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After a long period of thinking and reading user feedback, we have set ourselves a goal in what we think might be a more user-friendly version of Sakai. This goal should achieved by April, because that’s when we will migrate our current Sakai 2.4 to a Sakai 2.5 implementation, and we will probably need to go with that in order to get things in production.
These are some of the ideas we have:
* One of the issues that came out of the user research was that some users were overwhelmed with the information on the landing page and weren’t able to find the log in buttons. That’s why we simplified the landing page massively with only the explanation of what Sakai will do and two centered log in buttons.
* We also made a new Help and support page which is much clearer than the old one and again a lot more user action-centered.
* The university login page
* One of the main ideas we had was replacing My Workspace by an iGoogle like portal page that can contain all kinds of widgets. These widgets would give you useful information about all your courses or would allow you to do some quick basic actions without having to go into the site itself. The first part of setting up this portal page is a step you perform the first time you log in to the system which allows you to define the group you belong to and the widgets you would like to have on your portal page. This is of course editable after having gone through this process.
* A sample portal page for students
* A sample portal page for lecturers
We haven’t completely removed My Workspace, we have renamed it to Personal Tools and is a link in the top menu. That brings us to an important change in our designs which is navigation. We removed the “tabbed” browsing and the more button and just replaced that with one big bar that just contains the site title. We have the feeling that this might be less confusing and might prevent them from getting lost. We have also simplified the footer navigation. Another major thing we have done is adding top navigation which allows quick switching between the portal page, a list of your courses and projects, your personal tools, your settings an the help page. We also added a global search to the page because we feel this is really necessary for users to find things.
* We also decided on what we think should be inside My Personal Tools. We think for now only of resources and calendar, because other things might be redundant.
* The Courses and Projects page. This is just reusing the Membership tool and might need changing at a later stage.
* A site view, which is basically still quite similar. We have added 1 function, which is to give users the possibility to collapse/de-collapse the tool menu. This might be useful when you are working inside 1 tool and would like to be using your screen space more effectively, or when you are really familiar with the Sakai tools, …
* The My Settings page which is just a re-use of the current Preferences tool
* This is the page that will contain the results of a Global Search across all of the sites you are a member of.
* A couple of storyboards on how we think some of the widgets inside the portal page might look like and how they would interact with the user.
We have received our new project and it sounds like: “Try to improve the usability of Sakai”. This sounds like a very hard yet challenging task … We aren’t very familiar with Sakai for now, so I think one of the first things to do is to try to know Sakai a whole lot better and try to find its weaknesses. After that, we will look into the all of the user feedback CARET has ever received (emails, request, …) and try to find a consensus between improved and new functionality …
After doing a lot of testing on CamTools labs and going through the entire QA process, the MySakai widgets have finally made it into the Cambridge production site. We are very pleased with the speed at which the widgets retrieve data and operate.
In order for students to be able to find all of the widgets, and get instructions on how to install them, we have build a small website that contains an overview of all of the widgets. This website can be found at http://www3.caret.cam.ac.uk/nicolaas/ and looks like this :
If you would like to have a look at all of these widgets, but you are not a member of the University of Cambridge, you can send an email to me (nicolaas.matthijs@caret.cam.ac.uk) and I will create a Friends account for you.
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