We at Georgia Tech have felt compelled to pursue some significant redesign work under the umbrella of the assignment2 project. The basic issues and concepts remain those that were sketched out on the Fluid wiki several months back (see http://wiki.fluidproject.org/x/KhQa), and we have a fledgling design or two built around that problem space, but we feel also the need for an extended period of usability testing and refinement of the design across a number of iterations.
What allows this temerity is the sdata-JSON-client-side approach pioneered in the My Sakai efforts at CARET, combined with the fact that the UI views concerned are mostly a matter of focused arrangements of tabular data. Carl has written extra handlers for producing JSON feeds for assignment data, and now the stage is fairly well set. We're pressing ahead with jQuery as our Javascript library (as insulator against many cross-browser issues, among other things), while we plan to enter usability testing in the middle of May, for which we've recruited a dozen or so interested faculty and students. Our lack of design resource is compounded by an ignorance of JS accessibility snares, but it's the hope that between keeping things fairly simple and our ability to iterate more rapidly that we won't paint ourselves into any inaccessible corners that we can't work our way out of. We also feel that a tactic of attempting to identify and produce Fluid components as we go is a natural way to educate ourselves, to achieve some reusability (and hence consistency) in our output, and to allow the Fluid team to find it worth their time to help us. An early component identified is the in-line editor, since this was already somewhere on Fluid's radar. It sounds like Colin's already laid some of the groundwork for us. When we enter the usability testing phase we'll plan also to have a public testing server, so that we can also take into account feedback from others in the Sakai community. Suggestions and questions most welcome. -- Clay _______________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list [email protected] http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
