Moodle Quiz UI for creating quizzes

Last Thursday and Friday, I have been to Helsinki University of Technology and University of Turku and done five wireframe/prototype tests. The results were, as always when it comes to usability tests, at the same time surprising and not at all surprising. I am indeed grateful for finding teachers and support staff from these schools to take part in interviews and testing.

The biggest surprise was that actually, adding random questions is not such a hard task - at least not if users first read a bit of introductory text (3 paragraphs) explaining the three core concepts (quiz/exam, question bank, random question). That is, in the test the setting was somewhat artificial since users were told to first familiarize themselves with the conceptual model of the application (actual usage of the application was not explained though). Clarification: Novice users did without  trouble create single questions to the quiz before having read the text, though.

So, the tests gave a preliminary promise that if users understand the underlying concepts, with a reasonable UI no further documentation is needed for a simple task such as creating an exam. This was the real challenge I thought we were facing with the UI, but it seems we are getting there, though slowly. As usual, we discovered several issues, too, but more about them as soon as I get the results into a reasonable format.

It is June 2nd, the first official day of Summer Code. As I have already done a great part of the actual usability work and there still is a substantial amount of usability research to do before implementing the UI as PHP, I will publish a new project plan today. (Update: I did.) I am also planning to do my masters thesis about this project, but I have not gotten very far with that, yet.

• Currently, I am still processing the interview data I gathered in the six interviews we did in May.
• Based on that work, I will publish an as-easy-to-read-as-possible usability document in Docs, based on which discussion about the actual usage scenarios can continue in the Moodle community.
• After that, I will put the current prototype and the findings of the actual usability tests online, too.

I am currently designing semifunctional prototypes using OOo Impress, and found myself in with the challenge that while in full screen (in a slide show), I need Impress to react to only mouse clicks that hit a button or some other element.

The normal behaviour, which is taken for granted of course is that when you click on a slide you go to the next one. There is no setting for this that I could find, but it is possible. I am using Impress 2.4:

1. Draw a rectangle around the slide, covering all of the slide
2. Right-click the rectangle, select Arrange => Send to back
3. Right-click the rectangle, select Interaction…
4. Select Action at mouse click: “Run program” and type /bin/ls for example, though this might only work on Linux “Go to page or object”  (no, “No action” won’t work), Select the current slide from the list (Update 2008-06-02: Having here something that can be the same for every slide allows you to paste the magic rectangle on all of the slides without having to change the action of the slide.)
5. Type the name of something that will run but will not show or use much processor power, such as /bin/ls on linux.
6. Click OK
7. Set the background fill for the rectangle to “invisible”
8. Done!

I do admit this is an overkill, and OOo really should have the feature to just disable advancing the slide show for the entire show at once. However, it works. Do report to me if it doesn’t work for you, please. :)

P.S. Once I get the prototype tested, I will publish it here next week, along with the test questions. It is, however, in Finnish (since my test persons are Finnish).

Someone working with KDE has a great open source usability blog, one of the things found was this bit about use cases and scenarios. Incidentally, this is just what I am currently working on.

Also there: The #1 Problem in OSS Usability and What I’m Going to Do About It, which Antti Kaijanmäki, another Kesäkoder, told me about some weeks ago. Though it is sad, seeing that other open source projects suffer similar problems helps keep me from going nuts :). Slowly I am becoming convinced about the critical need we have for clearly documented knowledge about our users.

Still, I guess the greatest challenge is to actually get the community thinking about users also from some other point of view than “I am the user so you should be listening to me about feature X”.

The discussion about the upcoming second prototype is heating up in the forums (alright alright, not that much yet :D). Otherwise, I have been contacting teachers, currently mostly from Haaga-Helia since they have been the most active, and trying to determine what to ask them once we get there next week.

Yes, the first interviews have been scheduled plus a usability teacher from my university, Saila Ovaska, agreed to review my plans before that. Last week’s chat with Ivar Ekman, a fellow CS student at the uni, has proved fruitful, opening my eyes to a set of issues I will still need to address.

I will probably post a new project plan at some point soon, too, taking into account that I have begun working on this already, contrary to the original plans.

Somehow I wish the process was even more transparent than it is now. I am not sure how to do that. I was inspired by Nielsen’s Guerilla HCI. How low could we take the barrier to usability work?

I feel that for me, learning about what to do in a project like this has been hard enough and I am still trying to learn more: having a concrete example about how a project like this should proceed, I dream, might help others to get a grip of practical open source usability. I would like to publish the interview material here, but the problem is that if my interviewees see the material beforehand, will it affect the actual interviews?

UPDATE: I am excited about the other discussion I found just now that is gaining momentum in the forums! This will be good :).

I decided to publish the winning presentation I gave in the Kesäkoodi finals (Open Document format, 202kb) a couple of weeks ago. It gives a pretty good overall idea about what the change will be about.

Also online: more detailed descriptions of the related use cases and how the change affects them.

On Monday, April 7th I was in the Spring meeting of Moodle käyttäjärinki, which consists of Finnish Moodle users and administrations from universities around the country. I presented the project briefly (without having told them anything about myself before the meeting) and requested contacts so that I could have real users to talk with, and usability testing subjects once I have a working prototype. Three people contacted me immediately and I got a recommendation to ask the ITPEDA network/list, as well.

There was plenty of discussion about other Moodle topics, such as administration and localization. I think I will post about those to the Moodle forums at some point - I’ll notify about this here.

Also, added some of the project introductory text as pages on this site, see under “Pages” on the right ->.

Also, I’ve started to get a grip of Getting Things Done using ThinkingRock, which, erm, rocks. What this means for the project? A more organized project leader is more probable to stay sane ;).

The COSS Summer coders were yesterday visible in the Finnish web media:

• Digitoday: Avoimen koodin käyttäjäkokemus kohenee kesällä
• Sektori: COSS-kesäkoodarit valittu

Also, I added links to the blogs of the other kesäkoders on the right-hand sidebar, as well as plenty of links to other places related to the project.

Got Wordpress installed in order to get Kesäkoodi started. Though actual work will only start in June, I will prepare by catching up on HCI literature and by thinking about how to make the entire process as transparent as possible. This is in order to learn with and hopefully to help the Moodle community get more ideas of what usability and working on user interfaces is about, in practice, in everyday software design.

Also the original application for Kesäkoodi is available for now, until I move its contents to Moodle Docs and other appropriate places. This site now contains the gist of it so I removed the original site; see the links under “Pages”, on the right-hand sidebar ->.