This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Type writer widget
Checkout these tiny little widgets for Apple nerds. Some look they could be handy, some are just ridiculous. Like the one that plays makes typewrite sounds as you type. I'm using right now. It's really really annoying. Yet fun.
Open source user centered design
From an email exchange between Chuck Severance (one of the leaders of Sakai) and Martin Langhoff (one of the leaders of Moodle). Martin Langhoff writing about Moodle's usability:
But if a particular part of Moodle has a bad UI that's OK: if enough people use it, we start getting "usability" fixes and patches, and it soon gets better ;-)
Maybe that's the approach Sakai's UI designers need to take - making improvements after release. On the down side, it's reactive, and it means we release a product that is not polished. It is not the UCD process we've held as an ideal, in which tools are carefully researched and designed before they are coded. It's also hard to do when your customers (faculty and students) have high expectations, and your team is used to delivering top quality polished work.
Our efforts to improve Sakai globally using a UCD process to some extent assume a controlled top-down approach. I'm pretty sure the writing on the wall indicates less centralization, not more. If we are to lose that control (and we never really had it), then we need to learn how to do guerilla usability.
I think that means we need to working more tightly with programmers, and possibly brushing up our own coding skills. We need to do fast testing, and reflect those test results in code quickly. This is one area where Moodle's PHP code base is a huge advantage - designers can start mixing it up in PHP with out steep learning curve and let the more skilled programers improve the code's usability and scalability once the tool proves itself.
If we're not involved in coding, it would still be a good idea to check stuff in. One's credibility in open-source land really seems to rest on what's getting checked into the repository. We've started checking in our materials for the style guide and did the same with the Gradebook specs. I think it helps to be playing in the same playground as the programmers.
I don't know that there's any easy answer here, but I'm trying to imagine a how open source user centered design works, and these are some initial thoughts.
Update: Check the enthusiastic user reviews of Moodle in this article from the SFSU newspaper.
Tags: opensource ucd moodle sakai