Adapt Learning Community: UI Design v2

Since the initial designs were released we've been busy questioning some of the design decisions we made, refining the layout and solving some of the limitations we discovered along the way.

Although we're still working hard to create an interface that is equal to the elegance of the Adapt framework, it's about time we shared the new designs with the wider community.

Please have a look at the UI Design v2 project and leave your comments using the 'Comments' feature. There is a handy arrow tool which allows you to point your comments at an item on the screen.

For general comments please feel free to post on the forum.

Thanks and we look forward to your feedback.

Kind regards
Michael

Hi Michael

Liking the design. I'll put some more specific comments on at a later date, but just in general:

Tech spec: The authoring tool is desktop/tablet based, yes?

Language support: I see a reference to different languages, but is this a reference to courses being in different languages, or can the actual user interface support multiple langs?

If it's the interface, is there any chance you can outline this functionality a bit more (i.e. does it expand dynamically, does it produce a scroll bar)? My main concern is that in a handful of places the designs are 'text heavy' (e.g. course structure - us designers can be annoying with our titles, you know ;) ) and with a language such a German (which as a rule of thumb is x3 length) even a dynamic interface may lose something in the user experience.

Would page and section title items be set to preview a set number of characters, and if you're on desktop, show the full title on rollover maybe?

Apologies, I may have flagged it last time. It's been a while.

Looking forward to giving the tool a good run through when it gets released!

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Sorry - I've put German is x3 times longer rather than x2 times longer. Me minus coffee.

Nicola

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Hi Nicola,

The authoring tool will run on desktops and tablets, yes.

Regarding language support, right now the user interface itself can support multiple languages. Although we only have English right now, others can be easily added.

Supporting courses of multiple languages is another matter and something which we probably need discussion on, for the reason you've mentioned among others. Courses in different languages may display different images too, and then we get into the realms of whether it's actually the same course at all.

Thanks,

Brian

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This will be a good (and necessary) discussion. We (NIIT Cognitive Arts) frequently build courses that need to be delivered in multiple languages. Probably like everyone, we have no bullet-proof, consistently "smart" way to do this. Lots of dependencies.

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Hi Brian,

thanks - regarding the languages point, we have captured the following in terms of requirements and architecture:

a single course can contain content in multiple languages
there is a default language setting, which determines the content shown upon course launch
the course structure, content and assets can be entirely different between the 'language versions' within the single course - this gives maximum flexibility
the underlying framework architecture (e.g. folders, and content data JSON files) are designed with this in mind - albeit the functionality to switch and deliver different languages is not yet fully built

So, in theory, this enables anyone to deliver entirely different content within the same course. The primary application for this is languages. However, it could also be used to deliver:

a single course with slight variations depending on location (localisation rather than translation)
a single course with slight variations depending on role (e.g. content for regular staff, managers etc)
branching scenarios (but this will need a lot more thought)

Hope this makes sense. The best checkpoint is the requirements documents on the community page.

Thanks,
Sven

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Hi,

Just wanted to check if comments like: "What's the difference between 'Asset Management' and 'Central Library'?" are appropriate? Or, is there some other resource I can look at for answers to that sort of thing?

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Hi Clark,

thanks for raising the question. It's very welcome.

The difference between the two is as follows:

Asset Management deals with functionality to manage the assets (e.g. images, audio, video) used within the entire tenant scope (i.e. assets from all courses). For example: view, get 'use-count', categorise, add metadata, delete etc.
The idea behind the central library is that some courses could be made available in their entirety to other tenants. From there, the courses could be duplicated into the tenant-area and modified.

The idea of the central library is the sharing of pre-built courses and relies heavily on the concept of multi-tenancy. This is discussed further in this thread.

There is also a resource, which helps dive into a little more detail with regards to the functionality - this is our requirements document.