Introduction
Stellar is the Institute's LMS baseline. Many of its features and workflows should be preserved in a state that continues to be user-recognizable. Given that and the fact that the initial LMS evaluation has established a core set of high- and mid-level requirements for improvements to the LMS platform, we are casting a wider net to learn what works and what doesn't for the people who use the system on a day to day basis. What workflow and interface solutions will be most widely-applicable across use cases? What amount of change and steepness of learning curve are our users willing to accept? To answer these questions, IS&T is seeking wide-ranging user involvement to inform our use case prioritization. In cases where there are no issues with current Stellar workflows meeting teaching needs, we have the task of improving those workflows or features for the next iteration of the LMS. This user research is focusing on the "how" from the user experience perspective, not the technology implementation perspective.
Design Notes
"A good web experience consists of useful and usable content framed by the principles of visual communication to create meaning and understanding for an audience. Improving the overall experience for Web site visitors involves not only proper solutions to technical concerns (such as download time and accessibility), but also presentation, emotion, approachability, and more. ... Web designers need to consider how their sites are structured (organization), how they look (presentation), and how they respond to users (interaction) — in other words, how they communicate."
— Luke Wroblewski, Site Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability
The primary role of a learning management system or a learning environment is not to "communicate" directly with an audience but to facilitate the communication and collaboration of its users (instructors, students, staff and guests) with each other. This role does not relieve us of the requirement to be "presentable" so long as Stellar is usable, accessible and well-structured, it actually makes the presentation and interaction significantly more important because usability and accessibility depend on it.
Beyond the Stellar gateway site, Course Guide and help pages, inside the system where users spend many hours a day, the interface should be so habitable, intuitive, responsive and streamlined that it becomes nearly transparent — receding into the taken-for-granted background and allowing the users to focus on their workflows, data and interactions, without having to do battle with buttons.
Use Cases
STLRNG:MITSIS/WebSIS Pre-Reg and Registration Workflow
Teaching Models
From Who's Teaching What
STLRNG:Teaching Models & Class Arrangements
Guidelines on Learning that Inform Teaching at MIT
A booklet that represents a survey of the literature in higher education and student learning. Each chapter contains quotations highlighting relevant points from the literature, followed by comprehensive reference lists.
User Experience Design Principles
insight
- in-depth knowledge of user goals, behaviors and workflows gained from usability/accessibility testing and direct user feedback
- clear vision and strategy for serving user needs and goals
- keen awareness of best practices, technologies, web standards and latest developments in the industry and their relevance for our work
harmony
- a seamless, coherent user experience across browsers and platforms
- interactive functionality that is user-oriented and unhindered by the limitations of the back-end architecture
- visually pleasing and coherent skins and themes so that users can make themselves at home within the application
- a usable, responsive and streamlined interface that does not get in the users' way
transparency
- meaningful error messages, clear instructions and form hints, and unobtrusive communication with the back-end
- accessibility features for users with alternative access methods
- internationalization options for users who teach foreign language classes or communicate with students abroad
- highly discoverable assistance options for reporting issues and suggestions
- outward-oriented development and bugfix documentation that keeps users informed of new features and solutions to problems as they happen
grace
- simple and elegant presentation, color schemes and text treatments
- layout and styles designed to degrade gracefully on text resize, within older browsers or in the absence of javascript
- valid, standards-compliant, streamlined XHTML, CSS and Javascript
- user-intelligible integration of new UI technologies, such as Flash, Ajax, and video
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