Meeting minutes for August 25, 2008
- Note that due to Labor Day, next week's meeting will be held Tuesday, Sept. 2 at the normal time.
Sakai/OSP 2.4/2.5
No new issues
Sakai/OSP 2.6 and beyond Development Status
Noah added two new efficiency-related issues: 14279 and 14280.
- SAK-14279 Avoid wasteful calls to resolveUuid
- SAK-14280 Improve efficiency of form handling by caching schemas
- SAK-14165 Portfolio assembly is slow with many completed Forms
- SAK-13146 Add custom form as an option on main page of wizard
- SAK-13719 (IUPUI) Matrix tool / tracking permission changes
- SAK-14417 Improving the Portfolio User Experience
- OSP Design and Development
- SAK-14279 Avoid wasteful calls to resolveUuid. There were no objections. This is in trunk.
- SAK-14280 Improve efficiency of form handling by caching schemas. No objections. This is in trunk.
- SAK-14165 Portfolio assembly is slow with many completed Forms. There are patches attached to the ticket, but they are not going into 2.6. UM will be running the patches in production.
- SAK-13146 Add custom form as an option on main page of wizard. Chuck Hedrick wasn't on call to discuss his progress.
- SAK-13719 Matrix tool / tracking permission changes (IU). IU will be going live with this next week. Lynn will do a demo sometime afterwards.
- SAK-13725 patch to enable exposed matrix and exposed wizard in OSP. This isn't ready for production, so it will not be in 2.6.
- SAK-1417 Redesign Portfolio User Experience. Beth created this ticket as a place for tracking plans for the Portfolio Tool redesign. It links to Nathan's mockups and also to a page for adding requirements.
New Development for 2.6
- We reviewed the new screenshots of the proposed Portfolios tool UI rework by Nathan Pearson. Comments included:
- Screen 1.1: The "Options" column should probably be renamed "Actions"
- 1.1a: Perhaps making the portfolio active or inactive should be an option in the pop-up menu. Under comments, it would be nice to have some way of indicating that unread comments have been added.
- 1: Approved
- 2: The question arose whether anyone has large numbers of portfolio templates, which would make this screen unwieldy. Probably not.
- 3:
- Does the screen take up too much room once you put the Sakai navigation in?
- Is the progress indicator misleading, since it would say "Complete" before you are finished with, say, adding all the pages you want. Perhaps it would be better to say "Ready" rather than "Complete".
- Should the Status section be moved to the Sharing page? This would take up less real estate on this page, but would make the Sharing screen more cluttered.
- Nathan explained that it is generally a good principle of UX design to allow multiple ways of accomplishing the same important task, which is why he put in tabs as well as links for actions such as "Add/Edit Content".
- 3a: The question arose of when the Preview button should become available. Nathan thought it should always be there, but show a blank screen with a message like, "No portfolio is ready for previewing".
- 3b:
- 4:
- Screen 2.After: It must be possible to select free-form portfolios. Also, it is often the case that there is only one portfolio template available for a site. Is this page even necessary if there is only one? Can't the single template just be assumed to be the user's selection?
- Screen 5.After: The original screen had two advantages. One is that the user can see what forms have already been selected, so you don't lose track of what you've already done. Second, selection of multiple pages in the multi-select box is straightforward, if not particularly elegant. UM, for example, has sites where users regularly add 10 forms of the same type. Lynn suggested that multi-select could be handled with checkboxes. Nathan responded that we are weighing efficiency against learnability, and it may be that learnability is a more important consideration in a screen that is not used that often.
- Screen 5a.After: Having "<add new>" as an option in the dropdown is a little too subtle - everyone but Lynn missed it. Should it be a button?
- Screen 5b.After: Everyone liked the preview of the form, though it was recognized that few forms will be as easy to preview as the resume entry shown in the wireframe.
- Screen 6: The difficulty with multiple "titles" was discussed, as this screen attempts to reduce to one the three types of title (portfolio name for listing, options form display name, and portfolio title as used in the portfolio website). The options form display name can probably be eliminated by accepting the automatically generated name but not displaying it in the form. There seems to be a legitimate need for the other two titles, though maybe a change in nomenclature would help. The idea of getting rid of the description field was discussed, since people don't seem to use it. Apparently it is available for display using a display triangle when a portfolio is shared with someone, so maybe it is useful after all.
- Screen 7.After: The share page would have multiple options, and a hidden div would slide down in cases where more info is needed, such as who you want to share with. Nathan will finish those mockups this week.