Mahara UK 13 : Let's talk about themes and usability

Let's talk about themes and usability

Roger EmerySouthampton Solent University

@SolentRoger

Current 1.4 Login page

Too much content.Only purpose of the page is to log in.

Ideas

Reduce the three boxes to the key functions we require of our students

How do we help the student that is stuck?

Common issue – what do I do now?A wizard or guidance?

More ideas…

Use action words

Ideas for ‘clean’ themes

Five levels of customisation

• Help and Lang files• General CSS for core theme• Additional Themes for users• Exposing existing functionality elsewhere• Core Code changes

Open to the floor – What do your users find difficult?

• Adding Images• Sharing• Adding items to pages• Profile page is not the

same as other pages• Functionality is spread

across different pages – easy to get lost

• Groups – who can see what? Not clear.

• Page and file management – difficult to organise when you have lots

• Copy page/template process seems to be back top front

• Too many steps/complexity

Open to the floor –How can we resolve this?

• Wizards– Maybe to prescriptive?

• More Drag and Drop• A page status and group

status page to get an over view and to organise favourite pages and or ‘hide’ others

• In page editing• In page image editing• Inbuilt image processing

(eg resizing and compression)

• Reduce the number of steps – expose functionality where it is needed.

What we have put into production so far…

Photo Album

by User

Conclusion

After discussion both in the session and in the bar afterwards it would seem a guidance area in the footer would be the starting point. It would require no changes to the core code and not be as restrictive as a wizard, but give suggestions of what the student may want to do next with functional links Eg, on populating a page the suggestion may be ‘would you like to share this page or add this page to a collection’ and so on. The link taking the student to the appropriate place to do such.

Roger EmeryLearning Technologies

Southampton Solent University@SolentRoger