[p2pu-dev] Make it easier to go to your own courses

Sun Jun 10 16:31:02 UTC 2012

The problem is that we've already had lot's of people submitting mockups
(over the life-time of the project), and in the end we end up sitting
around discussing back and forth what we think is better. FOr example, I've
always thought that the front page should be far more dynamic, whereas
others argued that it should be very clean and "Web 2.0y"...

What we've done incredibly little of is real user testing. Take a few
people who have never heard about P2PU, sit them down in front of a browser
and ask them to pull up the URL and figure out how to find a course, or
sign up. Ask them to think aloud, etc. Or take a few existing users, and
ask them to perform a few different tasks, and see how they go about it.
Even just the first two weeks of the HCI class gives pretty good
instructions on how to do this, and ideas (I realize this is something that
you can study for years, but I believe even something very rudimentary
would be a huge improvement to what we are doing currently).

One thing is user-testing of what we have right now, another thing is
creating mockups of various levels of fidelity. The HCI-course makes a
strong argument for parallel mockups - create a number of mockups and test
them all at the same time, rather than creating one, getting feedback and
then iterating (they even have empirical proof of this :))... One reason
among many is that you don't feel so "defensive" about a design being
criticized, because it's just one of many, so it's not like "you" being
criticized (which users also "pick up on")...

We could also try to create some simple user stories. Stian is a student at
P2PU. He has signed up for two courses. He thinks of something from his
course as he is walking home, when he gets home he wants to quickly log on
and share this idea with his other course mates, etc...

Maybe you could invite some people in to do user testing in Berlin? :)
(Also something that can be done online, although might be a bit more
complicated).

Stian

PS: To answer your question, one simple "50% solution" would be to add a
list of courses you are currently active in, to the drop down menu from
your user name - this is something that I think should be available from
anywhere on the site. And I think it's far more important than for example
My Profile or My Settings, or even Chat. (the two first ones could be
accessible from the Dashboard).

Secondly, we should change the way courses are listed both on My Profile
and Dashboard - only showing icons is not good enough, both for other
people visiting my profile, but even for myself (especially in the
dashboard where they are super-tiny). Text would be much better.

Thirdly, if we are going to have lot's of courses / groups that "never
end", we might need some simple algorithm that prioritizes courses. For
example on My Profile, the Researcher Homestead is not listed among my four
"Latest Courses", and three of the courses shown are courses where I have
not visited or posted anything for half a year. Something as simple as
showing all courses where you've visited or posted during the last month
would probably be a good first heuristic.

But of course these are just my intuitions, it would be great to test these
on people as well.

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Jessy Kate Schingler
<jessy at jessykate.com>wrote:

> i think these are really good observations and agree.
>
> it sounds like you are basically proposing a redesign of the
> dashboard/homepage for logged in users, is that accurate?
>
> is that something already on the table and/or stian would you be willing
> to visually mock up your intuitive assessment of what you would want it to
> look like? (even just roughly with a pen and paper, just to channel your
> observations into a layout proposal?)
>
> as a simple starting point that would be a big improvement (a "50% step<http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/05/29/mud-minimum-usable-design/>"),
> i could imagine using a layout similar to (so we could re-use the template
> for) the learn/ page, but where the big course boxes displayed, are the
> courses you are participating in (sorted by most recent activity), followed
> by the courses you are following.
>
> thoughts?
> jessy
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 6:07 AM, Jos Flores <josmasflores at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hey guys,
>>
>> it is a pain to go into a course indeed! I follow exactly the same
>> process, but can think that for a new member it has to be hard to find
>> stuff.
>>
>> The mailing headers were fixed about a week ago but I guess they are
>> not in production yet.
>>
>> Another thing that just bit me is re-ordering tasks. Just had to
>> "click on arrow + wait for page to load" 15 times to bring up to the
>> top the new task in the homestead group :S
>>
>> And the last one, threading in tasks is not optimal. The homestead is
>> getting some action lately and it's really hard going to keep up.
>> Email integration would be a big win... is that discussion still
>> going?
>>
>> cheers,
>> José
>>
>>
>> On 9 June 2012 04:24, Stian Håklev <shaklev at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Cross-posting from the HCI course on P2PU (I've been following the
>> Coursera
>> > HCI course, where they talk about user studies, paper prototyping,
>> > talk-aloud etc):
>> >
>> > I think it would be really interesting to do some user studies of
>> P2PU.org.
>> > One thing that drives me crazy is that it's so cumbersome to actually
>> get to
>> > the different course pages, unless you bookmark them. If I go to
>> p2pu.org,
>> > being already logged in, there is absolutely nothing interesting on the
>> > frontpage. I have to hover over my user name, and click Dashboard. Then
>> > there are tons of really useless status updates (all of which I have
>> > received in the mail - with actual content, already), and I have to go
>> all
>> > the way down to find a collection of tiny tiny icons, signifying all
>> courses
>> > I've signed up for, including several that I haven't been active in for
>> > months and months (but who bothers to actively withdraw from a course),
>> to
>> > find the link to the two courses I'm actually active in - this one, and
>> the
>> > Researcher Homestead one...
>> >
>> > (Of course I can click on a link from an email announcement, but still,
>> this
>> > seems like something obvious that would be discovered by studying how
>> people
>> > actually approach P2PU.org?)
>> >
>> > --
>> >
>> >
>> > and by the way, would it be possible to fix the email notification
>> subject
>> > lines, right now it looks like: [The Researchers' Hom]
>> >
>> > I know you probably have long lists of feature requests etc, but this
>> seems
>> > like something that would be easy to fix, and when you get 10 messages
>> like
>> > this every day it's really glaring and jarring.
>> >
>> > Stian
>> > --
>> > http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > p2pu-dev at lists.p2pu.org
>> > http://lists.p2pu.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pu-dev
>> >
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>
>
>
> --
> Jessy
> http://jessykate.com
>
>
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>

-- 
http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
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