From: Moore, Kathleen E kemoore@bu.edu
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2005 4:39 PM
To: sakai-dg-ui
Subject: RE: default style sheet changes?
Importance: High
Two members of the IT group at Boston University's School of Management
recently interviewed and observed 8 student users of Sakai. IT is
running a pilot introduction of Sakai this fall with five classes, and
we expect to recruit a larger pilot group for the spring. In fall '06,
we plan to introduce Sakai on a broader basis. Blackboard is widely used
at this school, and BU as a whole supports both Blackboard and WebCT.
Our sessions were led by Melissa Zarella, our User Services Manager, who
has been with the department for some years. I'm primarily a web
designer, new to BU and to Sakai, with experience in both visual and
usability design. I was on the design team that retooled WebCT in
1999-2000.
All of the students we spoke with were new to Sakai this semester, and
all were more familiar with Blackboard.
Our sessions were exploratory were not particularly focused on page
layout, but students brought many layout issues to our attention. The
remarks that follow are a mixture of student observations and my own
comments about the typography and layout of the Sakai interface. Both
the students and I are reacting primarily to the skin we apply to Sakai
here at BU SMG, but this is different from the default skin primarily in
its top and left framing information.
Students focused heavily on the Resources tool/page, and I've also spent
some time with the calendar page.
The outstanding problem in the Resources tool is the prominence of the
"properties" link associated with each folder in the student view. Even
students who knew better commented that it was the obvious place to
click, and it reveals nothing at all that interests them. We may
suppress it entirely in our own version of Sakai. I don't think that all
links need to be blue and underlined all the time, but having a link
that's blue, underlined, and left-aligned right under a more useful link
that isn't is certainly a misleading pair of clues.
Much of this discussion has been heavy on blue underlined links and slow
to grapple with issues of context and positioning that seem equally
important on these pages.
One of our students said, "in Blackboard, everything is lined up on the
left. In Sakai it's all over the place."
In general, left alignment is more familiar in our culture and
mechanically easier for the eye to follow. Centered elements on a
primarily left-aligned page are often disorienting, and the Sakai tools
are full of these, often centering action menus above left-aligned
blocks of information.
In Resources, important links are given small symbols within a banner
that's understandably read as a heading and is in fact a heading in
other contexts. Right-pointing and left-pointing arrows appear in the
default global left menu and indicate something entirely different than
they do here.
Shown the calendar, a student couldn't see how you would add to it.
Shown the action links, she pointed out that she didn't look for them
above the dates, but at or under the information. She commented that web
pages usually have a "submit" and perhaps other buttons at the bottom of
a section. Top menu bars are common in desktop software, but they're
unmistakable, and these look nothing like them.
In calendar, the "add event" link is not only hard to find but
inconvenient to reach even once you've learned where it is. It should
probably appear as close to the times to be filled in as possible;
ideally, it would probably link to each time on the daily calendar, as
it does in Microsoft Outlook's calendar.
I'd like to see some serious re-arrangement of the action links on all
of these pages; if we can do this in our own version of Sakai, we will.
Additional postings will follow, about our overall observations and
about the calendar tool.
Kathy Moore
Web Manager
IT Department, BU School of Management
617-353-2685
kemoore@bu.edu