[Contrib: Evaluation System] How do you all feel about the organization of the administration page?

[Jim Eng]

Hi Daphne, 

The admin pages are pretty hard to use, even when you know what you are looking for.  But they have been a low priority for work because, as you mentioned, they are not actually used very often in practice.  Or at least that's what I have heard since I've been involved in evalsys. 

It's probably obvious that these pages have grown organically.  Each time some new features or capabilities are added, new settings are added to the admin pages to control them. The surprising thing is that though evalsys is pretty mature now, the admin pages continue to grow.  Soon they will devour a small city just to sustain themselves.  

I mention the continuing growth with this in mind: If people work on reorganizing these pages, it should be done with future growth in mind, so new settings don't just plopped down at the bottom the main page. 

I think your idea of a card game to make decisions sounds about right.  :-)  And I think you are correct in saying that a well-conceived reorganization could be implemented without a lot of effort on the technical side.  But be careful that Berkeley is not the city that gets devoured. :-)

Jim

  
  
On Feb 9, 2012, at 4:47 PM, Daphne Ogle wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> We are starting to look at requirements for our next iteration of work on eval sys.  We plan to start looking at some of the authoring interfaces.  However, a potentially low hanging fruit that keeps popping up for me is the administration page.  Perhaps it is because I am a newcomer but the content is pretty overwhelming and I believe we could better group options by themes and perhaps do some rewording to both make the options clearer and show relationships with other options (if there are any).  Every time I have to find a new configuration setting someone brings to my attention it is painful.  The reason I say low hanging fruit is because it seems like a simple technology fix.  The challenge will be in creating an information architecture that makes sense to everyone.  
> 
> I think card sorting would be a productive way to create a new info. architecture and perhaps there's a way to involve some of us from across schools in that activity.
> 
> But since it is an interface we don't use often, first, I want to understand where something like this fits on the communities wish list.  The work would benefit us some but would really be more about making things easier for future users.
> 
> -Daphne
> 
> Daphne Ogle-Glenn
> Senior Interaction Designer
> University of California, Berkeley
> Educational Technology Services
> daphne at media.berkeley.edu
> cell (510) 846-8237
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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