Moodle

The convention I am using is: for sub-tasks, severity = minor means we can deal with this after the patch is committed. severity = major means we need to fix this first.

Do any of the changes in styles_ie6.css need to be copied into styles_ie7.css?

See MDL-17302.

Yay! review finished.

My plan is to go home now and rest my aching head (that is only partly the fault of reviewing code all day, it is mostly that I have tooth ache ). Then tomorrow morning, I will play with (test) the interface a bit more, and then commit it, unless I find any last-minute show-stoppers.

Olli, I think you should now go to http://moodle.org/mod/cvsadmin/view.php?cid=1 and request access to the folders listed in MDL-17286.

Thank you, Tim!

I will refrain from making changes to the code for now, then to make sure I won't have to do them twice.

I do not have access to IE7 at the time. If need be, I probably could find a friend with whose computer I can test if the IE6 CSS needs to be used for IE7, too.

Tim,

Though this is by no means crucial, I would have appreciated discussion about the changes to editconcepts.html beforehand. Mostly the changes are o.k, but:

• The text is now longer by about one fourth. The idea of this text is to really keep it brief as possible, since the barrier to read such instructions is high anyway. Especially the two sentences you've added to the third paragraph, while basic information, are probably too much for someone who has not yet tried out the UI at all, and too obvious for someone who has. If you still want to keep them, I would suggest formatting them in the way demonstrated below, to still keep scannability of the text at least moderate.
• Hard disc (->disk) may seem an obvious concept, but I would not expect teachers to know a computer peripheral - nor is it really relevant whether or not files are on hard disks or usb sticks or whatever. If you want to give context, I would replace this with the word "computer".
• I find also the grading instructions in the first paragraph making things more long&complicated, and do not quite see what they add. Especially this is quite subjective, though.

"When you create questions, they are stored in the question bank. In the question bank you can create categories, which are similar to folders on your hard disc. You can use them to create a hierarchy for organising your questions, for example, by topic. Even if you create and add a question directly into the quiz, it is automatically stored in the question bank too.

• If you later remove your question from the quiz, will remain in the question bank, unless you also go and delete it from there.
• As you construct your quiz, you can take any of the questions that are already in the question bank, and add them to your quiz."

I thought about asking you before checking in my changes, because I was not sure about some of them. Then I just wanted to get it done, and you were (probably) asleep at the time. So I just checked in what I had done, because I knew we could easily make more changes later. However, I probably should have waited and checked with you first. Sorry.

So please do make more changes to the file as you think best. I agree with you that the shorter we can make this the better.

But as the famous quote "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal) implies, writing short text is very hard. We may have to change this several more times before we get it just right.

(It might also be worth posting in the quiz forum, to get more people's comments.)

Ok, no harm done.

I had only head this one before:
In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Mainly I wanted to hear your reasons for adding the bits about grading, since they probably have to do with your better understanding about actual pedagogical vocabulary, but I can't be sure.

Well, there was a bit about grades in your text, and it just felt a bit out of context. We explain questions and pages by saying that they are just like a traditional paper test, so I hoped we could explain having to set up scoring rules as being like preparing a mark-scheme. I would expect most UK teacher to understand the phrase mark-scheme, but I don't know if that phrase is used internationally. I agree that we could easily just delete the last sentence of that paragraph.

Olli, Just a thought, the message 'This random question is not in use, since its category is empty.
Add questions to the category F in the 'Question bank contents' tool ?'

Is it a good idea to change this, so that "category F in the 'Question bank contents' tool ?" is a link, and when you click it, it reloads the page, switching the question bank to be visible (if it is previously hidden) and making it display the empty category?

Oh, I see, the category name, which is printed above that message, is a link that does exactly what I suggest.

However, that was not obvious to me where that link went, until I started thinking about MDL-17398 (for other question types, the link in the question name goes to the question editing form). I am about to post a more detailed comment there, with a suggestion.

Moved all issues from http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Quiz_UI_redesign_-_development#After_migration:_when_the_code_is_in_HEAD and from my notes here. This should be it for now.

Unless I have extra time or new critical things appear (in which case I will create more tickets from http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Quiz_UI_redesign_-_development), this might be everything I will do for the new Quiz UI. In addition, I will bring new tickets I wish to be done to quiz at a later time or by someone else.

Tim, do you think this is stupid?
in edit.php:532 onwards:

if ($significantchangemade) {
[...]
redirect($qcobject->pageurl->out());
}

That is in order to remove get params from url, that would change the quiz contents again if the user reloaded the page. This safety measure increases the number of HTTP requests. The get parameters could perhaps be cleared using javascript without reloading the page but we can't rely on that. Can you think of any better way to do this?

I think it is very sensible. It is good practice to redirect to a GET URL after processing a POST action. It makes it safe for the user to click reload or back, or bookmark the page. It is a big usability win in exchange for a small performance loss. (But actually quite small, since the work done processing the POST and the work to render the next page have to be done anyway, so the amount of duplicated work is small.)

Hi everyone,
I have just stumbled on CONTRIB-528. Looks like the new interface made its way to the HEAD.
Is there a place/forum to discuss it more? Should I post here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=103869?

Tim said "But I don't want to release this in Moodle 2.0, and then have lots of people turn round an complain that they hate it."
I will be the one of those complainers, sorry

Hi Elena,

Any feedback and suggestions for improving are more than welcome, of course. In my opinion that thread is just fine, unless your issues are big enough to start a new one.

Olli

Elena. There is a Moodle 2.0 test site at http://test.moodle.org/head/, and I just created Quiz testing course. Instructions for how to log in are there.

1. The Add new question drop down on the quiz page layout is confusing. It is not clear where the question will be added to (on the question bank you see the category name in drop down above). I added a question and found that it was added to the category selected in the question bank, if there is a default set one would expect it to be the quiz category given the location of the button.This needs to be removed it's confusing and is an unnecessary duplication.

2. The space taken up by the fancy quiz area is squashing the question bank side badly, even on a hi-res monitor. There needs to be more balance on that page.

3. The option to not show question text when viewing the question bank in quiz edit view seems to be absent. Can we have it back?This may help with 2 above.

4. Add a description/label. This needs to go. It duplicates the add new question drop down in the quiz and question bank area. Same issue with location of new description as above. These are called "Descriptions" in this context (although the may be used as a label). Label in Moodle means something quite different.

5. Update this quiz link: Unnecessary duplicate and inconsistent with other areas in Moodle.

6. The text description of the question type and the word "Preview" waste screen real estate. They are pretty but add no real benefit. Icons only are required.

7. Suggestion: Move page number to position above each page (no on left) too much space wasted with current arrangement.

8. Need to lose the wasted space to the right of Grade save button.

9. Questions per page label does not update on revision of pagination.

Thank you for your comments, Ray. My main question to you is, if you are a question bank centered user, would not the "Order and paging" subtab not serve you better?

1. The drop down in quiz editing area is supposed to add questions in the Default for [Course name] category, and for me it does that, regardless of what category is selected in the question bank. If in your installation it is affected by the category selected in the question bank, please file a bug with details.

2. It would be ideal if the size could be user-set with AJAX. The reasoning for the width is to provide the guidance (Scapin et al. 1993, http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/define/ergonomics/index_en.htm) for the user to understand the function of the screen. Lack of guidance for especially the uninitiated user was one of the most serious usability flaws in the 1.9 version of the UI: as it seemed to try to fulfill all needs at once, novice users were puzzled about where to start as there was no clue as to what the workflow was supposed to be. In the new version the UI is supposed to show clearly the "toolbox" role of the question bank window - question bank is a tool used in the goal of building a quiz. The question bank could be enlarged to something still clearly below 50%, but this compromises the main functionality of the screen. Question bank operations have a screen of their own anyway.

3. Question bank text is not supposed to be taking any space in the question bank window, since if the question name is long that will fill up the available width and the question content will disappear anyway - though this was still temporarily broken at least some days ago, since Tim is working on the CSS it seems. So what good would the option do?

4. Need for this was verified in usability testing - since description is not a question at all, it does not belong in the drop down with the question types, and users will not search for it there. The name "description" is misleading - also in other languages than English - also this is alleviated by the separate button. I was about to delete the additional "label" text for consistency but I think Tim thought it makes things clearer.

5. Inconsistency in this scale is hardly an issue, but for users who do not know the special vocabulary of Moodle by heart ("Update this quiz" instead of "Settings" or "Options") it avoids getting lost and provides easy access to modifying the status of quiz.

6. The urgent need for the preview label was repeatedly shown in the usability testing for the UI. http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Quiz_UI_redesign#Prototype_testing

7. In order to facilitate scanning the page quickly, the labels are kept at the left hand side of the pages.

8. Cannot lose the wasted space, since in different languages the strings are longer and if the box is too small, the layout blows up. If the size could be set based on the language in use, that would be great, but it would be hard to implement and to manage the changes.

Am I wrong or in the right column of the "Edit" quiz page the check box to select all the question to move them into the quiz instance is not working?
If you didn't understand which control I am talking about, look at the attached screen shot.

"Order and paging" sub tab: Maybe but that's another issue i.e. users now have to navigate to another page in this interface to achieve things they can do on a single page in Moodle now.

1. Yes, it does that. That's exactly my point. Why duplicate the existing functionality on the page. Even if there is a good case to retain this it's counter intuitive. A feature in the QUIZ adds a question to the default category for the COURSE.

You haven't commented on the unnecessary duplication of options to add questions and descriptions.

2. I don't agree. The current interface proportions and duplication of feature is more confusing than the current model. In addition, how can it be a usability improvement to locate question bank settings (Display questions from sub-categories too, Also show old questions) at the bottom of a list of questions where they are not visible even on a 1280x1024 monitor?

3. On my install the question/description text is displayed. Agreed, that when the question name is present this should take precedence. The ability to display the question text is useful when attempting to identify the correct question to add to a quiz. Therefore this is useful in the edit page of the quiz.

4. Description is not a question: Yes, and the word "Description" is far from ideal. I could live with "Label" of the description item in the drop downs was changed. The current implementation of mix and match is the very worst solution. "Descriptions" are used in a variety of ways so we have the usual Moodle challenge to come up with a suitably generic alternative. Of the top of my head: Independent page content, Spacer?

5 I think you may have mis-understood my point. It is not the text in the link but the link itself. Why not button only as everywhere else?

6. Hmmm. But the rule is broken on the order and paging page.

7. OK. Still, it a lot of wasted space. How does that look in R --> L language packs?

8. OK, but doesn't that suggest that this layout is not successful?

—

9. The location of the question bank management link in the navigation bar is not a good idea. Users get used to that area for one aspect of navigation and this approach confuses that. This link should be in the same location as the Show course grades link in assignments.

Daniele, I implemented that recently, and it works for me. Which browser are you using?

Ray, you are coming to the party very late in the day, and you are being very negative. This was all talked about in the quiz forum while Olli was doing the usability testing on which these changes were based, and I am not in the mood to rehash these arguments now.

4. This sort of thing is called a label on the course page. We have not decided on the final string. Naturally changing a string is easy, once we reach a consensus what it should be. That is why we are leaving that for now.

I have been using this interface for some time, and it is quite nice. Now, whenever I have to go back and test something in Moodle 1.9, that is when I think 'yuck'.

Lateness: Yes, only so many hours in the day I'm afraid.

Negative: I hope not. Direct, certainly as I think these are important issues particularly the duplication (which I think I commented upon when this change was first mooted).

The proposed interface is certainly attractive, I suppose my principle concern is that we don't introduce an interface that is aesthetically pleasing but brings confusion through duplication and imprecise interface terminology. I see enough new Moodle users each year to understand the implications of this.

Just my tuppence.

The thing is - although usability is, at the end of the day, an different world altogether than graphical design, they do share characteristics. The Gestalt laws are a good example of principles used by good UI designers and graphical designers, because they play into how people perceive things. And the way a user perceives affects not only whether s/he finds the perceived pleasurable, but also can either facilitate or seriously hinder understanding what they see.

There is a basic division about issues of a UI that I find helpful (thanks to Gabriel Michel at the Uni of Metz who introduced me to this division) :

Perceptive (before understading; the user cannot properly perceive what there is)

Semantic/navigational (the user perceives the UI but does not understand what s/he perceives)

Action-related (the user understands what he sees but does not know how he can react to it; for example, to manipulate it)

"1. The Add new question drop down on the quiz page layout is confusing. It is not clear where the question will be added to [when the user does what?] (on the question bank you see the category name in drop down above). I added a question [using which dropdown?] and found that it was added to the category selected in the question bank, if there is a default set one would expect it to be the quiz category given the location of the button[which one].This needs to be removed it's confusing and is an unnecessary duplication. "

Returning to point 1., can you please explain which "add question" dropdown does what for you by default. (You can see what I did not understand about your comment in the quotation above.)

You indeed did bring this up earlier: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=103869&mode=3#p461611 And I replied with the fundamental reasoning behind the change. Please tell me if you are unable to connect all the dots there, I know the documentation is not ideal. The testing I did does not seem to suggest that users have problems identifying that one drop down is in the context of a quiz, and the other is in the context of the question bank. In addition, novice users actually only see one drop down, since the question bank is hidden by default. Challenging the design solution would then require either finding problems in the argumentation in the thread, or showing with usability testing results that what you speculate actually happens.

Tim, for me, too that checkbox for selecting all questions is problematic, since it does not actually get checked itself when you select it, only the actual checkboxes do. Also, I am not sure if it communicates sufficiently what it does - it seems to me that although in windowing applications they've used that way of selecting all checkboxes, in the web nowadays the links for selecting/unselecting all is more common. Of course, I suspect this is not a major issue, many users will probably find it eventually.

Question bank issues are better in MDL-16345, which, you will note, is only half done. (I got bogged down on it for a bit, hopefully I am starting to make progress again now.) And there is now a sub-task for fixing the select-all checkbox. I have now confirmed my hunch, from the screenshot, that the problem is in Safari.

I've been pondering making the add question to this quiz dropdowns add the questions to the 'Default for Quiz XYZ' category. That keeps them better segregated in the question bank initially. If you later want to reuse them in another quiz in the same course, it is not hard to move them. So this may be better progressive disclosure, but I am not sure.

I don't have a problem with the duplication. I think there is a clear enough distinction between adding a question directly to the quiz, and adding it to the question bank for later use.

I am wondering if we should have a user pref. to remember whether you were last on the edit, or order and paging tabs. So, when you go away, and come back, you get back to the same one.

I am also wondering whether we should make 'Update this quiz' take you back to whichever quiz page you came from, rather than always having it dump you on the Info page.

> Daniele, I implemented that recently, and it works for me. Which browser are you using?

Ciao Tim
I am using FF on MacOS X.5.
Maybe I am waiing for the wrong behaviour.
What I expect is that by selecting the check box in the attachment (blue bordered) I get all the other check boxes, below in the same column, selected. Is this what I am supposed to expect?

Sorry, FF3.0.6

Daniele, it is what you are supposed to expect.

"I am wondering if we should have a user pref. to remember whether you were last on the edit, or order and paging tabs. So, when you go away, and come back, you get back to the same one. "

I really do not know. It seems that this would suit the users that use primarily the reorder tab, which I suspect to be roughly the same group as the question bank oriented users. But it does bring inconsistency into the behaviour of the tabs. It would need to be tested, or we could wait for feedback - nobody has complained about this directly yet, but I am not sure if "the average user" would come to think that it could be the way you suggest above.

"I am also wondering whether we should make 'Update this quiz' take you back to whichever quiz page you came from, rather than always having it dump you on the Info page."

Yes, that is the only logical behaviour to expect it seems to me. But this needs to be consistent across modules. What happened to making update this quiz/settings a separate tab, though? This way, it could just always return to the same tab, just giving feedback that the settings were saved or that there were errors.

Tim, I am not sure if you are aware of this, but inside a random question box for a category that has questions I get now:

Did you remember to make the first column something unique in your call to get_records? Duplicate values found in column 'qtype'.

• line 475 of lib/dml/adodb_moodle_database.php: call to debugging()
• line 423 of lib/dml/adodb_moodle_database.php: call to adodb_moodle_database->adodb_recordset_to_array()
• line 913 of lib/dml/moodle_database.php: call to adodb_moodle_database->get_records_sql()
• line 886 of lib/dml/moodle_database.php: call to moodle_database->get_records_select()
• line 751 of mod/quiz/editlib.php: call to moodle_database->get_records_list()
• line 477 of mod/quiz/editlib.php: call to quiz_print_randomquestion()
• line 708 of mod/quiz/edit.php: call to quiz_print_question_list()

Oops. Non-unique first column problem fixed.

I suppose the current state, Edit or Order and paging, should be clear from the UI, so storing this in a user pref should not be too disorientating for users.

What to do about navigation has grown in scope and is currently being discussed in the General Developer Forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=115620. We probably need some decisions there, before we finalise some of these decisions about quiz editing UI.

Response to Olli
Date: 11/Feb/09 09:11 PM

See olli_1 screen shot for answer to which drop-down.

The drop-down in the quiz area and the Add description/label button are clearly associated with the quiz by virtue of their location. I (without the benefit of user testing or a research background in this field ) would expect that a question or description added from this location would, by default, be added to the default question category for the quiz. currently they are added to the default question category for the course.

So users in your testing may have identified the contexts for the drop-downs but the output i.e. question created doesn't follow that logic.

In practice, many users will need the question bank open so that they may add questions to the quiz. Adding deleting questions will probably be the most frequent action when viewing this page (why do you need to see this page when the quiz is finalised? focus then is on results). Consequently, as the interface is currently configured that see 2 create question drop-downs that do the same thing.

Let's not forget that under these conditions a description can be added from 3 locations.

Unfortunately I don't have time to revisit the discussion relating to these changes or commission usability testing to support my assertions.

Response to Tim
Date: 11/Feb/09 09:38 PM

"I am also wondering whether we should make 'Update this quiz' take you back to whichever quiz page you came from, rather than always having it dump you on the Info page."

On my install the link and button bearing this text take one to the quiz settings page. I am still of the opinion that the link is superfluous.

Yes, but after you click the 'Save and display' button on the quiz settings page, you are always taken back to mod/quiz/view.php. If you just wanted to change one setting while editing the quiz, that is annoying. It is where you go after clicking save and display that I was talking about.

The reason for the duplicate link is that the way the rest of the page work necessarily depends on the shuffle questions and questions per page options. That is why those options are displayed at the top. Is you see those settings there, and want to change them, is it clear that you should click the 'Update this quiz' button on the other side of the screen?

Whether the question bank is open or closed is closed for you is remembered permanently as a user preference, so once you have started to experiment with the question bank, it will stay open (but until you do, it will be closed, simplifying the interface.) I think that is good.

Making the dropdowns in the quiz area add question specifically to the part of the question bank private to this quiz is something I am considering. It is a very easy change - probably just one line of code.

"Yes, but after you click the 'Save and display' button on the quiz settings page, you are always taken back to mod/quiz/view.php. If you just wanted to change one setting while editing the quiz, that is annoying. It is where you go after clicking save and display that I was talking about. "

Indeed. But you should not introduce a new behaviour for this module only fro Save and display. This needs a separate button. Think carefully about how you describe this though. "Edit" has 2 meaning here - edit quiz settings or edit questions set up.

"The reason for the duplicate link is that the way the rest of the page work necessarily depends on the shuffle questions and questions per page options. That is why those options are displayed at the top. Is you see those settings there, and want to change them, is it clear that you should click the 'Update this quiz' button on the other side of the screen? "

It's as clear as it is for every other module and resource. This option adds another exception to the Moodle interface. And on the subject exceptions "Question Bank management" in the navigation bar is still a very bad idea. It's another exception "it works in this way, oh, apart from in here". Better moved below the update quiz button.

Just to make sure things get replied to (please tell me if there is still something unclear, this discussion is getting so long that I am not sure if I missed questions):

"2. I don't agree. The current interface proportions and duplication of feature is more confusing than the current model. In addition, how can it be a usability improvement to locate question bank settings (Display questions from sub-categories too, Also show old questions) at the bottom of a list of questions where they are not visible even on a 1280x1024 monitor?"

Priorities. These two settings are not by default central to the use case of editing a quiz, although they can be useful for managing the question bank. Give me a central use case where quiz editing requires showing questions that were deleted, or where we cannot assume that the reasonable default of showing questions from subcategories does not work most of the time?

"5 I think you may have mis-understood my point. It is not the text in the link but the link itself. Why not button only as everywhere else?"

Here the Moodle convention of the "update [module]" button is problematic, since it is not coherent with anything besides itself. As it is not changing tha standard button but adding another point of access to it, I do not see an issue here: links are for navigation and buttons for action, also in Moodle, with some single exceptions. See: http://www.guuui.com/posting.php?id=1978

"6. Hmmm. But the rule is broken on the order and paging page. "

There is no rule. There is an use case where the label is appropriate, and another one where it is not.

"7. OK. Still, it a lot of wasted space. How does that look in R --> L language packs? "

See: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=111241#p521824

"8. OK, but doesn't that suggest that this layout is not successful? "

Well, we could wait for the Perfect Web Browser to come around before doing any usability work at all. If you wish to cast your vote for this improvement, please do create a ticket for it.

We could always move the discussion to the quiz forum, where threading is better.

Hi
We finally slowed down after our upgrade, so I would love to suggest some things for the new quiz interface.
Is http://test.moodle.org/head/ is more or less up-to date? (I cannot test anywhere else, sorry!)

Do you know the trick that if you hover your mouse pointer over the Moodle logo at the bottom of the front page, you can see the Moodle version. http://test.moodle.org/head/ seems to be a few weeks out of date at the moment. I don't know who is responsible for updating it.

Marking this bug fixed. It is basically done. There are probably minor polish issues to be taken care of during the Moodle 2.0 QA cycle, but they can be handled through separate bugs.