[DG: Teaching & Learning] Sakai UX Working Group--upcoming research projects?

[kamann at stanford.edu]

Hi Teresa
I hope it is OK, but am cc'ing the UX list in my response in case others have something to add (or others have similar questions). The UX working group is a rather informal group that, unfortunately, has not been meeting regularly. That being said, many members of the Sakai community who do UX work subscribe to the list above and collaborate on joint projects, which have their own meetings. 

Two collaborative projects you can read about are listed here
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/UX/Sakai+3.0+capabilities+for+learning+activities
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SLIB/Sakai+3+and+Library+Integration

In these cases, the interviews being conducted are intended to learn about users and their needs as opposed to usability studies, which would be done after something was built or wireframed. While both projects are at an early stage, I think they are both at a point where it would be hard to do user interviews, as there have been 2 months of meetings.

However, these research projects are sparking some interest around doing this kind of user research around other topics, especially in the Teaching and learning community, who has been helping the UX community to conduct interviews. It is not clear if this will lead to new projects on other topics--these two examples above represent cases where a campus team was interested in building capabilities for 3.0 and had UX people to do outreach. We have yet to see this work in reverse--where the non-coding members of the community gather data around a particular need and attract developers to build it.

The main body of 3.0 is being built by Cambridge and Georgia Tech. It is not clear if they are doing outreach and research or if they are busy developing but maybe they can respond here.

My advice would be to subscribe to the UX list and/or Pedagogy list at http://www.sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-community/page/ if you haven't already. That way you can hear about news or send a question to the list.


Best
Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing,Stanford University



----- Original Message -----
From: "Teresa Zangerl" <Teresa.Zangerl at mci.edu>
To: "keli amann" <keli.amann at stanford.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 2:32:15 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Sakai UX Working Group




Dear Keli, 



my colleague from the IT department - who is at the moment responsible for programming-issues concerning Sakai – just told me about the Sakai UX Working Group. I found your mail address on the website and figured that you’d be the right person to talk to. 



MCI – the university I’m working for – is planning to roll out Sakai 3 in autumn 2011. At the moment we are testing Sakai 2 with one academic department. 

The actual reason I’m writing to you now is that one of our major research topics is Usability and User Experience. We would be very happy to contribute to the development of Sakai 3 – e.g. with a research project or student interviews. How do you usually handle that? Should we just start “researching” right away, or are there any specific topics you want/need to be covered? 



I’m looking forward to hearing from you! 



Kind regards, 

Teresa 




BRIDGING UNIVERSITY & BUSINESS ® 
MCI MANAGEMENT CENTER INNSBRUCK 

Mag. (FH) Teresa Zangerl 
Research Assistant 
Management, Communication & IT (BA) 

Management, Communication & IT (MA) 

Universitätsstraße 15, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria 
Tel: +43 512 2070 -1429, Fax: -1499 
mailto:teresa.zangerl at mci.edu , www.mci.edu 




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