I had recently attended the first Future of Web Apps conference in London and had been fired up by Tom Coates‘ talk about the future of data mashups (owning ones own data and reusing it in various contexts) and was looking forward to building on this philosophy. Of course my main problem was that a massive institution such as the Open University is was very wary about sharing data and integrating with third-party applications and the project seemed to want to recreate apps like Flickr and Delicious rather than use their API. Hitting this brick wall was a bit of a setback but I soldiered on regardless with the design, hoping that the aesthetic approach might rub off on the development side and push the boundaries of what was possible with an ePortfolio.

Rather than document my progress here, I started posting to my OU blog instead. We went through various iterations of the design, building on user feedback and testing. The biggest problem was that ‘user’ was defined as the course teams who would prescribe the software in their courses rather than the students who would use it. So the whole thing was designed and built by committee and I ended up a little dispirited by it all. I still have some conceptual design work that I hope might be used if the project is ever revisited in the future. For now, MyStuff is available to OU students and it will be interesting to see how they cope with it.

I was also involved with many other interesting projects at the Open University. I was asked to find out how the OU could support students using mobile phone channels such as SMS and the mobile web. I undertook some research and carried out a pilot SMS alert service with a small group of 450 students. The reaction was very positive and I’m now looking into the ways in which the OU can adapt to provide a similar service to all students given its rather complex business model.

I worked on the redeveloped OU online prospectus, Study at the OU, with my ex-colleague Stephen Turvey. We were asked by the Head of Online Services, Ian Roddis, to create a fresh, usable and accessible design that could be user tested to death in order to create an experience that would help recruit and retain students in a era where government funding for students doing a second or equivalent degree was being withdrawn. We came up with something minimal and easy to apply to the complex existing systems. The project is ongoing and we’ve yet to move into the second phase where rich media and interaction is applied to the course descriptions but we’re certainly moving in the right direction with this very rewarding project.

Stephen and I also worked on the OU Careers Advisory Service website redesign which earned the award for AGCAS HE website of the year. We put a lot of hard work into developing a subtle yet appealing design with intuitive information architecture.

My ongoing work at the OU is now to create a community of practice for online web standards. The OU is a huge community and there are many web designers and developers. Until early this year we were a rather fragmented bunch but Twitter has brought us together. Not only web designers and developers but librarians, academics and support staff across the main campus and the regional and national centres. I’m talking to people in departments I didn’t even know existed and hearing about many interesting and exciting projects. I honestly think that we now have a critical mass to do some truly innovative projects. Take SocialLearn and OU View on YouTube as two examples of where the OU has now finally moved away from wanting to control all aspects of data, design and production. Even the non-official OU Facebook apps are gathering steady momentum and are seen as being useful student support channels. It looks as though 2009 might even see the OU drop the in-house bespoke web Content Management System for the open source goodness of Drupal. There’s an interesting time ahead at the OU that I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into on my return from paternity leave next week.

It’s still very rough around the edges but I’d say it’s at about alpha stage now, ready for a bit of testing. Needs a lot of tidying up and severe usability testing before going anywhere near the general population though.

It would be interesting to see how some of the target audience for the system get on with it. What I’ve seen is quite bewildering – many many features to get you head around! No idea how many stakeholders were involved but it shows that there were a hell of a lot!

I still think there’s a need for a ‘MyStuff lite’ that starts with a single feature and does that amazingly well before moving onto the next one (which would be what the majority of the end-users were crying out for). But that couldn’t really be defined as an ‘ePortfolio’ I guess. Having scouted about the net looking at other ePortfolios I’ve yet to find one that makes any sense to me.

On a purely aesthetic note, the cut and shut design (metal topbar?) is looking pretty ugly but I’m sure that can be bashed into shape with a bit of time. There’s no scope for me to do anything like that at this point though – I’m simply doing some work to make the form output a bit more presentable.

Will be interesting to see it evolve. Are you using MyStuff? What do you think?

1. OUTEXTS – A pilot text message service to students. Students sign up for free text messages which alert them about upcoming assignment hand-in dates, exams and such like. I’ve developed the web support pages and well as coordinated with AACS and Student Services colleagues to get a pilot system up and running.
2. OU Web Standards – Styles and standards for OU web sites. Includes principles and spec for HTML, CSS, Accessibility and Usability principles. Working with David Winter and a bunch of other chaps on getting some ‘OU furniture’ together to make building websites a bit more easy. Things like ‘what colour scheme / layout / navigations systems / typography / imagery would work well for my site’.

What about MyStuff?

I did a lot of visual design and user experience design for MyStuff but that’s as far as my involvement went. This work was passed over to coders and programmers to attempt to make sense of my doodles. Like the rest of you, I’m interested to see the final result!

MyStuff is the Open University’s ePortfolio system. It’s built using the Moodle VLE platform.

The current system map for MyStuff. As detailed as I can get right now. Still needs work though.

Another mind map shows the types and functionality within the system.

Today’s design iterations seek to fix some of the high-level information architecture issues. I’ve removed the ‘quicklinks’ toggle (for the time being) in order to free up some screen real estate for the breadcrumb/titles to breathe. The user should now have a much clearer idea of where he is within the system.

We have a completely new ‘about me’ which falls into line with the other spaces – certainly it’s less confused. The notion of a ‘Profile’ is still not clear but maybe in the next iteration or two this will be ironed out.

Creating a ‘new item’ loads a behemoth list of potential items to create but puts the non-space-related item types of ‘note’ and the various file uploads to the top of the list.

You can see the latest screens, as usual, on Flickr.

I’d like a little feedback on the following critical issue, if you have time.

The ‘breadcrumb’ navigation is all over the place. That’s because MyStuff is by nature ‘all over the place’. It’s all about creating something that can be reused in multiple places. As a result, strict hierarchy is difficult to define. And users who like things in strict,easily navigable hierarchicial order will struggle. Trust me, im designing this thing and I really struggle with it!

There is no ‘sitemap’ in existence for the system. I’ve had a go at creating one. In doing so, I’ve identified that it is difficult to locate certain things within hierarchy.

The most glaring issue is the nature of difference between ‘spaces’, ‘compilations’, ‘forms’ and ‘items’.

‘Spaces’ enable users to go to their course and fill in ‘forms’ for a course defined purpose. These forms might be from the general pool of forms created by Erica or from course defined forms. Most data entered in a ‘space’ will be useful for a final ‘compilation’. The data entered in the forms in a ‘space’ context’ will also be available to view in the general ‘items’ area.

When considering the breadcrumb hierarchy for the data ‘item’ there are a few breadcrumbs that could exist that take the user to the same ‘item’:

1. MyStuff / spaces / about me / personal photos / photo.jpg

2. MyStuff / items / files / images / photo.jpg

3. MyStuff / compilations / web / photos / photo.jpg

It may be that we define that ‘items’ don’t have a breadcrumb at all. Or maybe they have multiple breadcrumbs. Maybe breadcrumbs only exist for the system itself, not the items or compilations stored within it.

However, not having a breadcrumb for the items or compilations is troublesome. It means users either have to click the ‘back button’ to get to previous pages (if they didn’t direct-link to the item itself!) or go back to the MyStuff homepage or global navigation elements and move forwards till they find the item they want. This is little inconvenient though. Multiple breadcrumbs could prove useful. Consider the example above. Depending on what the user wants to do, she can click items in one of three potential paths.

1. is the item’s location within the ‘spaces’ hierarchy

2. is the item’s location within the ‘items’ hierarchy

3. is the item’s location within the ‘compilation’ hierarchy

But are there more potential places the item could live?

Sure:

An item can belong to many compilations:

MyStuff / compilations / web / me / photo.jpg
MyStuff / compilations / bu130 / evidence1 / photo.jpg
MyStuff / compilations / h808 / evidence / photo.jpg
MyStuff / compilations / web / likeness / photo.jpg
(..and on and on..)

As long as ‘about me’ is a space, an item can belong to multiple spaces:

MyStuff / spaces / about me / photos / photo.jpg
MyStuff / spaces / bu130 / photos / photo.jpg
MyStuff / spaces / h808 / photos / photo.jpg

This problem is not unique to MyStuff though. Consider that a photo uploaded to Flickr can live in the photostream, a set, a tag and a collection. Flickr deals with the issue by essentially placing the ‘parents’ of the photo in the right-hand column (photostream, this photo also belongs to, tags). This is a good way of dealing with the hierarchy without using breadcrumb trails as such.

So we could adopt this method. But this raises the question of ‘spaces’. Does an item ‘belong’ to a ‘space’ or is it merely created within one? If spaces are the means to group forms in a usable context then the forms need a hierarchy too. So we’d have a category called ‘personal’ where users would go to add addresses, work history and stuff like that. They’d go to a course space, say BU130 to enter data specifically relating to that course. They wouldn’t add personal info in this space as they would do that in the ‘personal space’. Therefore forms are not reused in different spaces, they are unique to them.

But what about ‘file uploads’ and ‘new notes’? What space do these belong to? Yet again, my mind is in knots.

If we redefine the nature of a ‘space’ so that it can only be used to input data, not select data (a compilation feature) then there is no space for ‘About me’ as a space as it is currently designed. In this design, the user can select items to use in the space. This is what compilations do! So should spaces do the same thing? I don’t think so. ‘About me’ shoul be the means to add items using the ‘Personal’ forms. But crucially, not select a favourite one.

Where does this leave the ‘personal profile (about me)’ then? Well I’d suggest moving it to ‘settings’. Here it would behave similarly to a compilation but with no downloadable output.

So, here are my wireframes for the ‘About me’ space.

Thoughts?

Notable updates include screens for the BU130 ‘space’. This model follows through to the STM895, H808, K214 and U122 workspaces.

See the latest batch of MyStuff screens on Flickr.