[Building Sakai] [CWux] Fwd: [WG: Sakai QA] high priority UI issues

[Jacqueline M. Mai]

Hi Charles,

Please see my response inline below to SAK-17273.

Thanks,
Jackie

---------- Forwarded message ---------- 
From: Charles Hedrick < hedrick at rutgers.edu > 
Date: Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 7:33 AM 
Subject: [WG: Sakai QA] high priority UI issues 
To: sakai-qa at collab.sakaiproject.org 


Anthony Whyte suggested that I should include this list on something I've sent to the dev list. 


I realize it's late for 2.7, but there are a few areas causing us so much trouble with users that I'd like to find a way to prioritize them. I'm sure others might have different priorities, but mine are 


http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-17270  - tests and quizes losing submissions. This one just became clear to me yesterday, after processing the Nth report from a student claiming he had submitted an assessment when he hadn't. The final confirmation screen is probably the wrong design. We actually asked for this. Students had been doing "submit for grading" without intending it. As a local patch we added a Javascript confirmation box "are you sure". Stanford agreed, but turned it into a normal screen. The problem is that if students don't read the screen carefully (and many don't) they think the extra screen is the final submit confirmation. So we have otherwise good students telling faculty that they submitted something they didn't, and faculty believing that Sakai is losing submissions. We have a workaround for this as well: we have a way to recover all the data for assessments that weren't submitted. I think the best approach is to go back to the Javascript confirmation box. Students are used to confirmation boxes, and are unlikely to confuse an "are you sure" popup with having finished. 

I have not seen pop-ups used in Sakai, especially as a means to ask users whether or not they want to proceed with a critical action. Seems like the convention is to present a normal page - called confirmation page - that asks the user whether they want to do X (e.g., are you sure you want to remove item X?) and the user has to decide between proceeding with the action or not. If we introduce a pop-up, which is not an expected behavior, I don’t know if you would get the result you want. Would users close the window because they didn’t expect it? I don’t know the answer to this but the pop-up solution might introduce new usability issues that are undesirable. Also, how would you address popup blockers, which would prevent critical information from being shown to users at all? Finally, if the theory is that students do not pay attention to whatever shows up after they click Submit for Grading, then it does not matter if the warning shows up as a popup or just a regular page in Sakai. They would still think that they have officially submitted their responses for grading without actually doing so.

Earlier this year, Stanford made some usability improvements to the button label and positioning within Tests & Quizzes. The navigation buttons appear to the far left (Previous/Next), then the Save/Exit/Submit for Grading buttons appear to the right. The Submit for Grading button no longer has the same position as the Save and Continue button (now called Next), which in the past has facilitated accidental submissions of an assignment before ready. This improvement has not yet made its way to Sakai (at least I’m not seeing it on sakai nightly for 2.6). Once this improvement is contributed back Sakai, one option is to remove the current warning page since users are much less likely to accidentally submit with the new placement of the Submit for Grading button. Another option is to keep the warning page as a normal page but reduce the amount of text and make the buttons more prominent - right now there's too much text on the submission warning page, which makes it more likely for users to ignore. It's also looking less like the other warning pages in Sakai, which might be another reason why it's ignored. I’m more in favor of the latter option since submission is such a critical action that it would be prudent to verify that users actually want to go through with it. I am also open to other ideas that you or anyone else might have.