Calendar Suggestions
Here's yet more user-feedback fallout from the Sakai group at Boston University's School of Management. We ran a pilot introduction of Sakai this fall with five classes and are setting up a larger pilot group for the spring. We plan to introduce Sakai on a broader basis in fall of '06.
Some of the following observations about the calendar are our own; it was only after working with students, who did not rely on the feature but wished they could, that we developed a special interest in the tool. Sakai is new to me, so my own observations are fresh if not within the student persona. (KM)
It's impossible to discuss any of the specific tools without getting into some general issues about page design and typography, so those are included.
There are potentially many calendars: one visible from within each course and one in My Workspace. Students had ideas about uniting these so they could have one integrated calendar that they could check online. Ultimately, they'd like this set up so it could be synchronized with a PDA. One student commented on the security of knowing her schedule would be saved on Sakai should anything happen to her PDA. Overall, they expressed a strong desire to utilize the software as a way to more efficiently organize their student life.
Several students wanted to see the calendar used as a dynamic syllabus. This might translate into a "best practice" among faculty.
Within an existing calendar:
(Apologies for recapping issues of page organization that come up within most tools.)
A student had to be shown where the "add event" link was. The issue is not just underlining and color but, probably more important, placement.
This student pointed out that the action links were above the dates, when she would look for them at or under the information. (Top menu bars are common in desktop software. Interactive web pages more often show actions at the bottom, as with a "submit" button.)
One student 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.
The "add event" link is hard to see and 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. For example, clicking within a cell in the schedule would allow the user to enter an event for that time
- When you do create a calendar event, the date defaults to the present date each time you access "add event," even when your view of the calendar is set to another day. This presented itself as a repeated user error until I became aware of it, and it remained a significant inconvenience as I used it.
- Viewing the schedule in any arrangement (week, day, month), it is difficult to know what the date is since the date is in a small, light gray font far over to the right of the page. A more obvious spot for it is currently taken up by the "printable version" link.
- Long drop-down menus are inconvenient. Having to select am/pm and mouse to a time again and again is much more effort than clicking on a date and time, having that come up as a default, and correcting it from the keyboard if necessary. This frees the user to type nonsense, but wouldn't most of us take our chances on typing an error, which we can edit, rather than repetitively selecting items from a long list?
After adding items to the calendar, I tried to edit them. Happily, I was able to click on each event to move in the direction of the "edit" screen. But this screen presented three groups of buttons which it took some effort to analyze.
My eye went first to the horizontal groupings on the right, first top and then bottom. The essential equivalence of these two groups was not obvious because the one extra button in the top row makes their overall shape dissimilar. There is no "edit event" selection in either of these two groups.
The bottom left group, where I finally found "revise and delete" was the last thing I read, because my eye had moved from top right, across that row, and then to the other row in the same column. Jumping the gutter back to the left was almost an afterthought.
A unified list, with a slight divide between date-selection items and revise/cancel, would be easier to read. Also, the button affordance works well with just a few buttons. When you get a large array of default-html buttons, the visual noise of so many irregularly shaped gray rectangles obscures the information that identifies each. A simpler type treatment or more considered graphic treatment would work better.
We'd love to see this tool worked into something that could come close to rivaling the calendar in ms-outlook for intuitive access and ease of use, and we hope we can move it in that direction.
Kathy Moore, Melissa Zarella
kemoore@bu.edu