[Contrib: Evaluation System] Template editing UX

Ellen Yu Borkowski eyb at umd.edu
Thu Jul 23 12:04:08 PDT 2009


Stephen

I'm not sure I have the answer either since I am not a UI expert, but  
I am wondering what the best way is to have this "conversation"?  Via  
email thread or should I be posting comments on the JIRA ticket?

At Maryland, we currently only have 2 people who edit the template,  
but the goal is to allow others to do so.  We have one HUGE template  
so I understand the issues of screen real estate that you are talking  
about since I've grappled with it myself.  I like the changes you have  
made, but have the need to have some of that metadata back that was  
removed.

Is it possible to think about adding some more 'icons' to the screen  
that will display the metadata when you mouse over?  Or, is that a UI  
"no no" to do?

Ellen

On Jul 23, 2009, at 2:23 PM, Stephen Marquard wrote:

> 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
>
>
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---
Ellen Yu Borkowski
Director, Academic Support
Office of Information Technology
University of Maryland
College Park, MD  20742-2411
301.405.2922 (o)
301.830.0196 (c)
301.405.0720 (f)
Email: eyb at umd.edu
http://www.oit.umd.edu/as/staff/Ellen.html




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