[Contrib: Evaluation System] Template editing UX

[Stephen Marquard]

Hi all,

Here is the base JIRA for template editing changes:

http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/EVALSYS-633

(Nov 08, also circulated to the list around that time).

Our motivation for embarking on this work is that we intended to launch Course Evaluations as a self-service tool (which we have now done), and the previous UX for editing templates was too cumbersome for end users to use (in our opinion). I'm aware not all institutions let end-users edit templates; for example I think UM doesn't, UCT does, Cambridge does. It would be helpful for others to describe who edits templates at your institution.

The basic UX problems were:
* Blocked items very hard to work with (changes involved unblocking, changing an item, reblocking)
* Editing an item made you lose your place in the template because of page flow (i.e. you ended up back at the top of the template)
* Reordering items in a template of non-trivial length was very cumbersome.

The difficulty with drag & drop re-ordering is basically that the more vertical space occupied by a question, the harder it is to re-order (because you can only drag something say a few questions up before you run out of screen real-estate). So our approach to this was basically to reduce vertical question size by truncating the question display (dropping styling) and some of the metadata. We subsequently put back the category info (for non-course questions), so you'll see that for instructor/ta category questions.

Your perspective on this may vary. If you only have a few people editing templates and/or you don't care about ease of re-ordering, then none of this may be significant and you may be happy with a lot of space taken up by each question. Alternately there are probably various UI options such as using icons rather than labels (which we've already done for some operations), mouseover text, etc. or a toggle on the page to show/hide extended information.

If anyone would like to make suggestions as to how to meet these competing UX design goals, we are happy to hear them, and will undertake to implement some reasonable solution leading up to the next 1.2 evalsys release. 

When that should be is another good topic for discussion. We should also consider collective focused QA on some timetable, specifically to bring out this type of institution-specific issue (I see http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/EVALSYS-777 is another example of something that fails when a UMD-specific feature is turned on but works otherwise).

Cheers
Stephen