Adapt Learning Community: Design stream call 15/08/2014

Attendees:
Daryl, Daniel, Brian, Michael

Notes from call:
Reviewed the updated authoring tool including; filters within the dashboard, asset management, plugin management, modifications to page the structure to make it quicker to build out courses, themes and live updates to extensions (the run through of this was pretty quick so i may have some of the detail slightly wrong!).

Main focus of the call was to continue the discussion around the component form creating/editing and how learning designers would like the interface to work.

Daryl had spoken to 7 or 8 people to gather feedback and we discussed this at length during the call.

Overwhelming opinion that accordion interface does not work as it's felt there are too many clicks to get to key information and generally people would like a number of different views depending on the task and individuals workflow preferences.

Like the idea of using a quick filter within the left-hand sidebar. Similar to the asset management interface. Users like the ability to jump to a granular level of detail as required. Can be achieved with a search box and select box.

Alongside filters would like to see a list of first level items as navigation within the left-hand sidebar. Suggestion presented by Daryl was to show links for General (body, title, etc), Settings and Items. Items would then have a sub-view which would list all the items in the component.

To achieve this 'filter' separation we would need to change the property schema to define settings.

Users requested a progress indication of how many things completed but this may be tricky to achieve from a technical perspective.

Required fields of a component should have sensible default values which would allow the quick creation and preview of a course.

Refining the design has posed a question about the ability to lock down settings and higher level items within a component depending upon user access privileges.

Need to present 'save' and 'cancel' options consistently throughout the authoring tool. Preference is top left as it is the most import action on a page.

Next Steps:

Wireframe the sketch ideas from Daryl into MockFlow for further discussion.
Review and update previous designs to benefit from the advances being made to the interface while designing the component editing screens
Book tickets to Derry
Eat more biscuits

Thanks for posting these, Michael. Couple of questions:

- Are we talking chocolate digestives or hobnobs?

- What's spread of learning designer user-testers who have provided the fb? i.e. are we talking about users with a non-technical background, who are spread widely across the community?

- I was thinking a bit around progress indicators. If a user tried to Preview/Publish a build, and hadn't completed a component, could the authoring tool flag incomplete fields on a component level in the same way that JS can red flag a html form if it isn't complete when submitted? Or is this what Debug would do?

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Hey Nicola,

I did the research internally at Kineo and asked around different roles including Learning Designers, Project Managers, Developers and one outside source who works closely with UI. I'd like to open this up further but at the moment we're short of time and we're wanting to get something out in front of users and work from there. I have spoken to a few people about doing a showcase on the editor soon once we have something we can show.

Currently in the editor we have an alert that tells you if you haven't completed a course - articles have blocks and blocks have components etc. We're discussing the ability to have required and default values. What we hope to have is a quick to preview workflow - where it's easy to build the course structure without filling out too much content, yet still being able to preview.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Daryl

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Hi Nicola

Couple of quick answers but there is more detail on the latest design stream call notes.

Are we talking chocolate digestives or hobnobs?
Any biscuit is a good biscuit!

What's the spread of learning designer user-testers?
Daryl has answered this question for you but we intend to open the discussion to the wider community once we have completed a more finalised version of the component editing screens.

The use of progress indicators?
Progress indicators is a very valid point and this was raised on the last call. From a UI perspective i love the idea of showing how much of a component has been completed vs what's left. From a coding perspective i think this is quite tricky to achieve given the nature of components but will defer to the technical team.

Cheers
Michael

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When we use 'adapt-create-course' at the moment, Adapt generates a set of components with dummy text in, which allows us to preview.

In the authoring tool, are you envisaging that, when users put a component or block or article in, all the fields will be blank?

Nicola

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