This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Labeling issues in UI
There's currently an issue post in sakai's change request database regarding the 'assignment' label in the Gradebook. Someone quite reasonably questioned the label "assignment" to describe those things which are graded in a gradebook. This is something we've gone round and round about, and resolved in usability testing.
You can spend hours having rational arguments about the best label for something in a user interface, only to find the most rational suggestion slows down the people who use the tool. This was one of those times. Here's my comment on the case:
This is always a tricky area, especially when you consider that tools go by different names at different schools. At MIT we plan to use the Gradebook and call it that, but we have no plans to use the Assignment tool, favoring our own Homework tool in it's place. Also, we allow instructors to relabel their tools. So in some cases a class may call it's Homework/Assignment tool "Problem Sets" and it's Gradebook tool "Feedback." This doesn't effect the precise area of the UI mentioned in this suggestion, but keep in mind the flexibility of labels.
Now on to the "assignment" label...
In designing the UI for the gradebook we conducted series of usability test using a prototype (though not in the context of the assignments tool). We gave them the UI and the syllabus of a pretend class and asked them to talk us through how they would set it up, using the prototype. We tried both 'assessment' and 'item' in the UI and found that they lead to confusion. When using Item and to a lesser extent Assessment people weren't sure if that link would do what they needed. When we switched to Assignment, that problem dropped away.
I'm not saying that means we've found the solution and shouldn't change. But I do propose that the change be made on the basis of further usability testing. We'll be doing a round of testing this Fall on the live gradebook tool. We'll share the results and the protocol, and would love to see results from other schools.