For the past couple of months we’ve been planning a comprehensive set of what we’re calling “UX Walk-throughs“—a combination of heuristic evaluations and cognitive walk-throughs—of Moodle, Sakai, and uPortal. The goal of these walk-throughs is to identify areas of the user interface that are most in need of improvement, allowing us to prioritize our design and development work based on providing the most benefit to our communities.

To start, the UX Walk-throughs will focus on content management-related tasks within each application. In this context, we’re defining “content management” in very broad terms, including the common scenarios in which students and instructors upload, create, manage, and use content for teaching, learning, and research. This extends broadly to also cover the kinds of portlet/channel administrative management seen within uPortal as well. This focus on content management covers a large portion of the use cases for our applications; content forms the backbone of Sakai, Moodle, and uPortal. It also fits well with Fluid’s overall strategy of building reusable UI components that provide new and more effective ways to work with content in portals and learning management systems.

It’s taken us some time to find the right balance of heuristics and guidelines for the UX Walk-throughs, but work is progressing quite quickly now. The Sakai working group is first off the mark, and will begin their walk-throughs next week. Interestingly, they’ve decided to pair up to accomplish the work. Members of the walk-through team will collaborate by phone while actually doing the walk-through, providing an opportunity to assess the process and share usability/accessibility knowledge as they go. These walk-throughs will provide a fun and valuable opportunity to learn more about design and accessibility while identifying areas of improvement within our applications. Volunteers, regardless of previous experience, are encouraged to participate.

How can you help?

There’s still a lot of work to be done, and help is appreciated. Here are some ways you can get involved:

• Join the Sakai, Moodle, or uPortal working group and help out with the walk-throughs themselves
• The UX Walk-through area of our wiki is in need of organization and consolidation. If you’ve got time for some quick editing and re-organization, please feel free!
• Share your accessibility expertise and advice with each of the working groups

Much thanks go to Daphne Ogle, Paul Zablosky, Clayton Lewis, and Mike Elledge for defining our walk-through guidelines and coordinating the whole process. Nice work, everybody! Thanks also to UC Berkeley and York University for offering real-world instances of Sakai and Moodle to test with.

One last quick note: I’ve been talking a lot with friends and colleagues about Fluid’s vision for personalization, the future of portals, and the student experience. Inevitably during these conversations, the success of Facebook comes up; we’ve all heard students say “I wish [Sakai/Moodle/uPortal] worked more like Facebook.” One of my pet projects over the next month or two is to apply our UX walk-through protocol to Facebook. I’m curious to see how successful Facebook will be against the usability and accessibility criteria we’ve defined. If you’re a Facebook user, or interested in trying it out, let me know if you’d like to help with this.