Talk:Developer meeting September 2008

Would love to see a talk on SCORM, roadmap and reporting.

Usability testing of new features

With this meeting at Midnight to 2AM, I doubt I will be able to make the whole event, especially on a school night:). So I will make my comment here.

I hope we can learn from the experience of adding previous additions that there needs to be some increase emphasis on end-user testing at the right stages of development with a focus on the usability of new features.

What I envision is that a short list of tasks be created jointly with those developing the feature and those who might us it, and that observations be made as a typical end-user attempts to carry out the tasks. Notes would be taken on issues that come up in that process and recommendations made, and that these ideas go back into an iterative development cycle until release.

I would volunteer my own school to do some of this for the current list of new features to give a middle/high school perspective. I would probably ask my Software club to organize the task and make the reports. But we should also have a distant learning institution, a Moodle trainer, a large college, and a corporate training department be asked to do a similar test and make a report from their perspective. I don't think this needs to be overly bureaucratic, but I do think there needs to be a structure and it needs to go beyond posting a request in a forum asking for general feedback. And I don't think you need too many reports to get at the vast majority of usability issues that are likely to be overlooked by those too close to the development process.

I would be happy to help with this process. If it proves useful, perhaps it can be applied to revisions of previous features that have had issues raised in terms of usability.

Gary Anderson 07:22, 17 September 2008 (CDT)