Hi Stephen, Historically, the admin UI has been treated as the *"red headed step child" of Matterhorn in that it has garnered little interest from the developer community. Some of the community feels that only a small population of users work with the admin app at a given campus so it doesn't need to be refined as a "consumer" facing UI. Ironically, the admin UI is central to adoption since it is the main control center for Matterhorn and what people see when they demo the system. There has also been tension between who is the primary user of the system (sys admin, program administrator, etc.) and UI service requirements that has challenged UI development.
That's not to say that people haven't worked hard on the admin UI, as there has been a lot of hard work poured into it. It's just that as the community has evolved, it appears this area isn't as high of a priority for institutions. It is also difficult to create a UI that pleases everyone, and there are many other areas of Matterhorn that need love. Personally, from my experience with other lecture capture systems, it's not an innovative redefinition of a lecture capture admin UI, but it certainly isn't "bad". I know you have expressed some suggestions in the past to improve the UI on list, and have wrapped elements of the UI in BLTI for your local LMS. It would be great if you could distill some suggestions in this thread to remind the community of some modest improvements that would make the product better. btw, UC Berkeley has dedicated resources to add more features to the UI for 1.4 and some modest usability improvements, but we don't have the bandwidth for a major refactoring. If others in the community have interest and resources to work on this area, we'd love to have you on board! Best, Adam *no offense to red head people or step children. just an expression. On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 11:47 PM, Stephen Marquard < [email protected]> wrote: > I have to disagree that the current UI is "fairly intuitive". The Admin > UI to me appears to reflect the approach of designing a set of services, > and then giving each service some UI space. > > Has any usability testing been done to date, and if so could someone > post the links to it? > > Regards > Stephen > > Stephen Marquard, Acting Director > Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town > http://www.cet.uct.ac.za > Email/IM/XMPP: [email protected] > Phone: +27-21-650-5037 Cell: +27-83-500-5290 > > > > >>> Christopher Brooks <[email protected]> 3/5/2012 9:11 PM >>> > Hi, > > I just wanted to separate one piece out of this: > > > > - If you have a deployed prototype, I can see about getting some > > > usability testing done here, maybe Judy can as well? We could > at > > > least do some less formal usability testing (think aloud, > etc.). > > We have not prototype we would like to discuss this first, before we > > > would spent our time on this. > > I see usability testing as akin to unit testing but for the UI. That > is, I don't think we should let any significant UI be released without > some form of usability testing if we have people who are willing to > test. Without usability testing, we run the risk of making changes > that are not appropriate for our intended audience. > > Usability testing is perhaps the single biggest thing we can do to > mitigate support requests. As is, the software is fairly intuitive. > I > don't want to diminish this if possible, and am willing to help out by > finding some people here to run through tests (even if I don't have > the > ability in the short term to rework the UI, at least we can look for > pitfalls). > > Chris > > -- > Christopher Brooks, BSc, MSc > ARIES Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan > > Web: http://www.cs.usask.ca/~cab938 > Phone: 1.306.966.1442 > Mail: Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems Laboratory > Department of Computer Science > University of Saskatchewan > 176 Thorvaldson Building > 110 Science Place > Saskatoon, SK > S7N 5C9 > _______________________________________________ > Matterhorn mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn > > > To unsubscribe please email > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > > > > > > ### > > UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN > > This e-mail is subject to the UCT ICT policies and e-mail disclaimer > published on our website at > http://www.uct.ac.za/about/policies/emaildisclaimer/ or obtainable from > +27 21 650 9111. This e-mail is intended only for the person(s) to whom > it is addressed. If the e-mail has reached you in error, please notify > the author. If you are not the intended recipient of the e-mail you may > not use, disclose, copy, redirect or print the content. If this e-mail > is not related to the business of UCT it is sent by the sender in the > sender's individual capacity. > > ### > > > _______________________________________________ > Matterhorn mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/matterhorn > > > To unsubscribe please email > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ >
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