One of the classes I am again teaching this term here at RIT is called Website Design & Implementation. By the time students get to this class, they should already be able to build decent Web pages; this course is aimed at getting them to expand their thinking into whole Web sites. The class is approximately half about design (page and site) and half about about coding (XHTML/CSS/JavaScript).
Sahana was conceived during a real emergency to meet real needs. Over time, the great work done by the initial and follow-up development teams has fleshed out the system to add needed functionality. This is a great start, but one major area needing work now that Sahana has grown so is that of the "user experience". I wanted to comment on four (4) areas which came up in today's in-class discussion of Sahana, all of which pertain to the "user experience" encountering Sahana.
These suggestions are respectfully offered as a starting point for a discussion about re-designing the user experience of Sahana; redesigning how people encounter and use the system. What has already been accompished is amazing, and perhaps we can make it work even better.
jeffs
The first general comment was that the "global navigation" displayed to a user provides too many ungrouped choices (in a big "flat" list format). The second general comment was that choices inappropriate to the current user state (not logged in, logged in as field worker, etc) appear and seem to be active when they really are not.
Disregarding links off the site (to Sahana home, to the Sahana chat server, etc), the user finds ten (10) items with links facing them (in the main content area on the page) even before they log on to the site. None of these ten links actually allow them to do anything; all simply return error messages about no permissions. Some of these links are not even appropriate content for someone not logged on (like synchronization).
After logging on as an administrator (for example), the user is confronted with 16 ungrouped items in one big global navigation list (still on the left). If an admin user (for example) selects "Administration", then the global navigation on the left side jumps up to 24 items, even with the sub-menus collapsed.
UI research has shown that this is far too many ungrouped choices for a "flat" list to display all at once. People are slowed in their selection of desired function, and indeed the choice-error-rate (and thus user frustration level) will predictably go up with more than 6-8 ungrouped choices in a big flat list.
I set up a new account for the class to use to explore the system. After performing the "add" operation as super-user, the new user still seemed to have no permissions to do actually anything. To add and then give even minimal permissions to a new user required the following selection-steps:
An administrator should have a quick and easy route to adding a new user with permissions for them to get work done right away.
Whether in the "logged out" of "logged in" state, all who visit the site see a list of ten (10) items Sahana supports displayed on the "Welcome" screen. Each item has a link which appears to lead to that module. Of course, in the "not logged on " state one does not need these dead-due-to-state links. The same thing is true if one is logged on as a "Field Officer", and probably also for other roles (I have not tried them all).
Only those items germane to the current user state (not logged on, logged on in a particular role, etc) should be displayed to a user. Nothing should be a link if it does not allow one to go somewhere by selecting that link while in the current user state.
Localization of what language is presented to the user should be a fairly easy process, from the point of view of the administrator. It is not. Fiddling with permissions and running things through merge processes on another machine do not qualify as "easy" for the non-geek administrator.
Visual representations of who is running a given instance of Sahana and why should also be easy for an administrator to establish. This sort of non-commercial "branding" is useful and can be reassuring to users (trust is an important issue).
Last modified: 5 Jan 2009 06:45:52 PM New York time