March 2, 2007 Agenda and Minutes

Agenda:

  • accessibility of YUI button
  • Action items from last week:
    • check out accessibility and licensing of Yahoo libraries
    • Create HTML mockup using YUI buttons (Harriet) - done
    • Show to some users (Harriet, Kathy if poss) - in progress
    • Discuss on UI-DG (Harriet & Kathy et al) - waiting for showing to users to be done

Minutes:

  • start with some usability feedback
  • Kathy: sketching the resources screen
    • 2 of 5 people didn't know that they could add folders
    • Harriet: we get a lot of support questions about how to create folders. People know they can do this, but have a hard time seeing how
  • Harriet: testing of YUI button
    • 3 tasks: creating folder, and a new file, rename a folder
    • 5 experienced Sakai users, but not particularly tech-y.
    • no one had any difficulty using the buttons, no surprise expressed
    • feedback generally positive
    • suggestions included size (e.g. text too small, button too large)
    • haven't tried it with people that were new to Sakai
    • people at CARET were less positive, because it's not a standard UI component
      • but the average person doesn't seem to cope well with the standard dropdown - the standard here hasn't been very effective
    • also accessibility issues
    • there's so much text on the page, that people weren't really noticing the multiple add buttons on the screen
  • another thing we need to look at - we have two new contexts for adding content
    • Gonzalo's suggestion that we simplify those and not display extra information
    • new create files and folders pages (can be seen on http://nightly2.sakaiproject.org)
      • Should be ready for comments by Monday or Tuesday
    • some comments for now:
      • add another file is nice
      • not clear what 'continue' would do
      • another button on that same screen that would provide access to properties if you wanted
    • Harriet: it would be good if Kathy and I could sketch out some ideas, since I can see tradeoffs
    • Jim: the pattern of a separation of metadata and content may have more to do with the implementation than the user
    • Kathy: why would encouraging that separation be helpful to the user?
      • it can be a bit overwhelming to have to think about both things at once
  • ACTION ITEM:
    • HT, KM and G to do page by page designs for JE to follow
  • so where are we with the YUI buttons?
    • it comes down to how accessible they are
    • Kathy and Harriet will still do some usability testing
    • after that they will discuss with UI-DG
  • ACTION ITEM:
    • Jim will follow up with licensing DG about YUI license
  • Jim: if we end up not going with the buttons, the fallback position will be the dropdowns you see on nightly
    • may want to separate menus, or think about whether we should keep them together
    • can we style the dropdowns somehow to improve them?
  • need some more time to look at what we have, some suggestions early next week