[Using Sakai] [Building Sakai] Playing with the 'Neo Portal' from Sakai 2.9

[csev]

On Apr 3, 2011, at 6:59 AM, Hedrick Charles wrote:

> Nice look. One problem: I need a place for a logo.


Gonzalo has a plan for that and suggestions are welcome.  One idea is to have a div in place above the navigation bar.  In the current look and feel and default out of the box, the div will be empty, but you will be able to skin it so that the area above the nav expands to put in a header.  I am thinking that we also make an option to move login/logout into that area if a site chooses to expand it. We could also take (yet another) cue from OAE and think of a logo space *below* the navigation bar.  And yet another idea that was floated was a logo that appeared above the content as you logged in and then fades away growl-style.   All ideas.

But really, this is something that we should all think through because there may be many approaches and some good ideas we have not thought of.  And once the technical machinery is in place and working tweaking the skinnability is easy to do and it is often pretty easy to provide lots of choices in skins.

Another idea we came up with and even experimented with is to take a cue from Twitter, Facebook, Edmodo, etc is to have the product logo be the far left item in the navigation bar and have it be the equivalent of "My Workspace".   Perhaps we make an option that allows skinners to replace the text of "My Workspace" with a properly sized logo of your choosing.  I did an experiment of doing this with a squished bottom half of a Sakai logo and it looked bad.  Probably because of my complete lack of graphic design skillz.

Of course the concept of My Workspace is pretty engrained in documentation - but it might be nice to give folks an option.  Rough idea below.  I think that Facebook, Edmodo and Twitter have a very clear cognitive purpose of making it so you click *their* logo to get to *your* starting/default space/view.  Also the PDA portal has an approach as well with a little Sakai word that is kind of "home":

http://nightly2.sakaiproject.org:8082/portal/pda/

I am not a graphic artist - I am a teacher and a user.  As a user, I am not happy to lose 120 pixels of vertical space when I am using a relatively small laptop screen for all my use.   There is a definite balance between building an effective user interface for the users of the product and making sure that the school has lots of designated advertising space on their LMS :)  

We are facing this very problem as we think through the dashboard.   Users are pretty universal in that when they first log in they would like to see a nice dashboard that has meaning to them and what they are trying to accomplish.  Of course university marketing wants the entire screen right after a student logs in to be a video message from the president about responsible celebration on St. Patricks day :)  Again a balance between the user and non-user stakeholders is needed :)

/Chuck

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