Development:Moodle User Interface Guidelines:Introduction

These guidelines are a UI design reference for Moodle developers.

The primary purpose is to document what is already there. While I developed an UI for the Quiz module, it often seemed that it was rather difficult to know how exactly to make UIs that fit the Moodle Style. I have now started to find out, and I intend to document it.

The other, and perhaps a longer-term purpose is to have a bit of a reference and a foundation to invoke discussion about usability issues, and to provide guidelines to the community about also how to make Moodle more welcoming to people coming from elsewhere on the web, who have gotten used to many other applications.

Reaching for both of these goals, I invite you to join me. I am currently funded for the duration of the summer of 2009, which can get us started together. I want to find out how this should look like to serve the community best.

At this point, you can help by commenting on Development:Guideline_template and on Development:Progressive_Disclosure. Since the former describes how the latter is written, it might be a good idea to read and compare these side-by-side. If you wish, you can even add new guidelines yourself, and I can take a look at them too. During July 2009, the number of guidelines will increase - if not by you, then by me. I will hope to have a lot of eyes on them to make sure they are easy to understand and use.

The point is to have something everybody will use in development. I want you to reject this, but do it now, please, not later :). Tell me what you think might be better. Let us build this together.

Thanks! --Olli Savolainen 13:50, 26 June 2009 (UTC)