Development:Usability/Improve Moodle User Experience Consistency: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:55, 23 March 2009

Proposition for Google Summer of Code 2009 (based on prior discussion with Tim Hunt and Helen Foster)

Olli Savolainen / University of Tampere, Finland

Executive Summary: Let's create lightweight Human Interface Guidelines style documentation for Moodle, to keep Moodle's UI consistent with itself.

Motivation

In Summer 2008, I worked to enhance the usability of the Moodle Quiz module, based on reported needs of teachers. During this project the lack of usability documentation became obvious. On one hand, there is an implicit Moodle way of doing user interfaces, but then it is not very well documented.

When I started working on the Quiz UI I was not deeply knowledgeable about Moodle as a whole. Though consistency was discussed in that project, the fact shows in the outcome. It was difficult to keep a complex UI design consistent with the whole of Moodle where the spectrum of UI elements used is quite limited. Moodle is just starting to introduce the fluidity of AJAX-style UIs.

Although I have been developing for Moodle since Summer 2006, I also consider this an important learning experience about the whole of Moodle for myself, to gain deeper understanding about the different possiblities provided by Moodle, and about how they correspond to actual user needs.

Summer 2009: In practice

Moodle is a web application. Web applications do not, in general, have strict consistency rules or UI guidelines. However, Moodle is also starting to be a big application.

Different parts of it share similar interactions, and they should work similarly across different components, or modules. To this end, developers should be capable of searching the documentation for topics such as “selecting a group of users” or “opening a file” and find a concise explanation describing what the user experience should look like and possibly how to implement it.

To facilitate usability testing, the intended use of the main core modules will be studied and preliminary documentation will be gathered so that anyone building on an existing UI will know what to build on.

Based on the usage scenarios and use cases of each component, a limited amount of usability testing will be carried out. Necessary improvements will then be suggested on the user interface level to enhance the interoperability between different parts of the whole.

I will implement changes that can be sufficiently usability tested, agreed about in the community, and are reasonable easy to implement in terms of software development. Larger-scale guidelines for improving consistency will be discussed in the community and documented.

Outcomes

Fixes to Moodle 2.0 UI code
Index of the current interaction styles and elements, with their intended uses. Should also be searchable by intended use, to find out what UI elements to use in a given situation.
Secondary outcome: find and gather typical use cases of core UIs/modules -> useful for usability testing and further UI design

The format in which to present the guidelines is still unclear. The main objectives are

Lightness, quickness: rather links to examples and screenshots than lengthy explanations

What is ahead

We need to do this together. Although I am promoting building at least some sort of a skeleton of a documentation on the User Experience (UX) level, the point is to create something that the community can embrace and use, as a part of the developer documentation used in everyday development discussions. Moodle already has a lot of documentation for technical considerations and it has usually been easy to get help for technical issues. Usability needs to have an equally important role, as discussed many times before.

The challenge in trying to standardize something such as UI designs, is that the whole point about developing applications for humans is often about creating new styles of interactions. Thus, it is key to create a strong convention to keep this documentation up-to-date. That is, whenever developers decide that something is missing in the catalog, it will be added. The most standard i.e. common and mundane tasks need to be the most easy-to-find, keeping at least them standard across Moodle.

My competences

In Summer 2008 I redesigned and implemented the Quiz editing UI: did interviews for scenarios, usability testing testing and community discussions. The result of this work is now included in Moodle 2.0 HEAD.

Before this, I worked in the University of Tampere on a Moodle integration project. I am also an Interactive Technology major in that university. I am currently writing my thesis about Usability processes in open source projects, with last summer's Quiz work as the principal case that is examined.

Background: The Ultimate Goals

Catalogue of interaction styles

As opposed to the Quiz UI work of last summer, the approach is top-down. The point is to examine the goals each of the main components of the user interface, in the context of Moodle, as a whole.

The goal is to create a framework for developers to think about and document the user experience (UX) of Moodle. The knowledge of what has been verified – typically with usability testing – to work for users, needs to be available. A Human Interface Guideline (HIG) is one way of thinking about it. However, there is rigidity and vastness to a typical HIG that we want to avoid: it is paramount that what is documented is both easily accessible and maintainable.

Later: Documented user descriptions and scenarios

The basic requirement of usability work is to "Know Your Users". However, at this point we do not deal with the actual profiles of users: the assumption in this project is that the community-based development style with a strong focus on feedback helps developers approximate user needs.

This knowledge about users is often expressed in terms of Personas, scenarios and use cases. Some work was done in the Quiz UI Redesign project but the format this was communicated in was not sufficiently easy to access. In a separate effort, Moodle should take a more robust approach to base its design on really knowing that we know our users, instead of the gut feeling of developers (no matter how close they might feel to teachers).

Also other aspects of HIGs, such as keeping vocabularies consistent and accessibility issues should be considered, but they are not the focus of this project.

@@ Line 61: / Line 61: @@
 The basic requirement of usability work is to "Know Your Users".  However, at this point we do not deal with the actual profiles of users: the assumption in this project is that the community-based development style with a strong focus on feedback helps developers approximate user needs.
-This knowledge about users is often expressed in terms of Personas, scenarios and use cases. [[Development:Quiz_UI_redesign_scenarios_-_Scenarios_index|Some work was done in the Quiz UI Redesign project]] but the format this was communicated was not sufficiently easy to access. In a separate effort, Moodle should take a more robust approach to base its design on really knowing that we know our users, instead of the gut feeling of developers (no matter how close they might feel to teachers).
+This knowledge about users is often expressed in terms of Personas, scenarios and use cases. [[Development:Quiz_UI_redesign_scenarios_-_Scenarios_index|Some work was done in the Quiz UI Redesign project]] but the format this was communicated in was not sufficiently easy to access. In a separate effort, Moodle should take a more robust approach to base its design on really knowing that we know our users, instead of the gut feeling of developers (no matter how close they might feel to teachers).
 Also other aspects of HIGs, such as keeping vocabularies consistent and accessibility issues should be considered, but they are not the focus of this project.

Documentation