[LON-CAPA-dev] RE: User interface feedback.

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Gerd Kortemeyer wrote:

> Then somebody fix the interface and make it great. I am sick of bitching.
>

Okay, so after a cup of coffee, and a nice walk across campus with fresh air
and sunshine:

These are the issues that bother and/or worry me - they are open for
constructive discussion:

* it does definitely not help to simply state that the interface is bad -
there is no constructive element to that, and it gives us no ideas what to
change. Besides, folks are beating a dead horse

* believe it or not, we have spent a lot of time and effort on the
interface. Yes, we are not interface designers, but we will not magically
become interface designers if people only beat us enough

* some dedicated and well-intentioned efforts by helpful people have led to
a worse interface, and we get the complaints

* folks want features, features, features. With those come more controls.
LON-CAPA can do orders of magnitude more than BlackBoard - low and behold,
the interface does reflect that.

* folks want features, features, features - but we have only limited
programming capacity, so maybe interface does get neglected

* I am especially frustrated by people who want flexibility and features,
and then whine over the outcome of their own demands. For example, a user
who is basing their grading on number of attempts, days before deadline, and
percentage of mandatory versus optional questions (and LON-CAPA allows them
to set up all those formulas), and then whines about the Spreadsheet being
so complex.

* the same is probably true for the problem editor. LON-CAPA is by a far cry
and hands-down the most sophisticated online assessment tool that's out
there - period. Well ... so now you CAN do all of that stuff. We could have
made a great editor to ask 1 out of 5 non-individualized radio button
questions.

* the most productive approach so far has been to start hiding the advanced
features behind an "Advanced" button. The SimpleRAT is an example for that,
so is the new PARM screen, and hopefully some of the features that go into
0.6.

* the SimpleRAT is also a good example for one of my biggest worries: more
bugs. SimpleRAT's pre-0.5.1-release was causing all kinds of bugs and
troubles. While the user experience might be simplified, the overall
complexity of the LON-CAPA code increases, and so does the number of bugs,
and the need for more and more testing. In my book, I would rather have a
clumpsy interface than more bugs - note that in all of this, our coding
resources are limited.

* there were some conscious decisions in the current interface design, where
unfortunately form did have to follow function. An example is the Remote
Control (yes). Let's look into some of those:

 - most systems have the controls in a table. Since however LON-CAPA allows
authors to basically upload any HTML (as opposed to the cookie-cutter design
of other systems), they can in particular upload bad HTML. An example would
be an unclosed table, which would also destroy the controls if they lived
inside of table cells. Attempts by us to automatically clean up HTML have
had very mixed success.

 - another approach would be frames. Here the problem is what some designers
at MSU have already experienced with BlackBoard: inconsiderate HTML can
easily shoot down frames, e.g., target=_top or target=_parent - gone are the
controls, and lost is the student

 - the separate window was chosen because it is robust against bad content.
Also, it does not interfere with content and page design, which some folks
are very particular about

 - button labelling in "Hebrew" (or "UNIX commandline talk", etc): This is a
screen real-estate problem. Most of us are used to high screen resolutions
on 21 inch screens. Students usually do not have that. While some of them
actually set their screens to 800*600 (yuck), the decision was to support at
least 1024*768. Writing out the commands simply takes too much space.
Cranking down the ASCII font size is not cross-platform compatible ...
besides, you can override that in any browser.

 - we try to show only the functions that are actually available to the user
at the time, instead of having a button that you are not supposed to press
at a given moment. Thus, the remote dynamically changes based on context.

Having said all of that, if somebody comes up with a new command interface
that fulfills all of the above - GREAT!!!

* "Call in a usability expert or consultant!" - well, great, pay big $$$ for
someone to spend two days with the system and then tell us all that is wrong
about it. Make some interface mock-ups that might have nothing to do with
and are ignorant of the underlying data structure and philosophy. Leave us
developers there with the expectation to make all of that happen, and along
the way change so much in LON-CAPA that it breaks ... we cannot affort that.

* Some things have changed: for example, in 0.6 instructors can now choose
that the first page student see after entering a course is the table of
contents.

We do have very high hopes for a collaboration with our MSU Virtual
University team, who can hopefully over time and with sufficient knowledge
of the overall system change the interface - and yes, they do have interface
designers over there.

- Gerd.