Collections / View navigation - usability problems

[Richard Mansfield]

View Collections, the way they are currently on master, are confusing for users seeing them for the first time.

People may think that they're a way of organising and ordering views into folders (for the owner to find them more easily). That's another feature that has been requested by people on the forums but it's not addressed by this stuff at all.

Part of the problem is that the name 'Collection' doesn't really express the fact that the only point in putting views together into these 'things' is just so that views can be linked to each other when they're being displayed to others.

Comment from David Drummond on the forums:

I *do* see collections as something that could evolve in a lot of different useful directions - something that could come in an iterative process - and that may cover a way to organise views. Not quite there yet though granted. For that reason I'd suggest leaving them as collections might be a good idea to drive that direction of development in future iterations - rather than having to rename something again down the track.

If that's unreasonable, then maybe something more explicit to the actual initial use case is needed. Perhaps "Navigation Lists"? or even "Manage View Menus" (and change the blocktype to "View Menu").

Comment from Richard Wyles via email:

Yes, there's also a problem with a View only being able to belong to one Collection - users won't understand the access challenge/conflict which is the reason? Can't Title, Description and adding Views to Collection be all on one page? Then the action could be on the My Views page and be called Connect Views or something. Keen to be included in discussions like this as the more menu items and pages then it becomes harder to achieve good usability. The other route to this via the Access page dashboard.

[Richard Mansfield (richard-mansfield)]

After a bit of temporary doubt it turns out that most people are pretty happy to leave it the way it is!
:)

[Richard Mansfield (richard-mansfield)]

Both Craig and Kristina were initially frustrated by the lack of a link on the collection name in My Collections (see email below). So unless anyone has strong objections, I think we should link the collection name to the first view in the collection, if the collection is not empty.

From: "Craig Eves"
To: "'Richard Mansfield'"

Hi Richard

I expected the behaviour to be like the View interface where the view name links to the view so you can see the view easily.

I think the collection name should link to the first view tab rather than the manage view. The collection has links at the top to manage the view so probably doesn't need to link to the manage views page.

The main thing is that being able to view the collection without have to copy and paste a url is required.

cheers
_________________________________________________________________
Craig Eves
MyPortfolio Support
Flexible Learning Network
_________________________________________________________________

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Mansfield
Sent: Monday, 23 August 2010 5:06 p.m.
To: Craig Eves
Subject: Re: My Collections v1.3 master.dev

Craig Eves wrote:
> > Hi Richard
> >
> > When I hover over the collection name the link is inactive so I can't open the collection from the My Collections menu.
> >
> > The links for edit, manage and edit access all show but not for the collection name.
> > The collection does exist at
> > http://master.dev.mahara.org/view/view.php?t=....
> >
> > I am using Firefox 3.6.8 and Microsoft Vista
> >
> > It sounds like I should report this as a bug.

Craig,

It's actually intentional - we deliberately didn't link the collection
name to anything. But what was the behaviour you expected? Where do
you think the collection name should link to?

I could think of two options right now:

(1) If there is at least one view in the collection, then it could go to
that first view (and if there are no views in the collection, it could
be inactive); or

(2) It could link to the manage views page.

R.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Hi Richard,

"So unless anyone has strong objections, I think we should link the collection name to the first view in the collection, if the collection is not empty."

I think that is a sensible solution. Will we have a link somewhere on the view pages that says "Edit Collection" and "Edit Collection Access" so that users, like on views, can get to the edit page easily?

Kristina

[Ruslan Kabalin (rkabalin)]

I think that active (current) collection tab should not be a link. It might make navigation more intuitive for those who see it the first time. When there are only two tabs it is a bit puzzling to find out which tab you are currently on. I clicked several times on the current tab trying to switch to another one, thinking that the current is green (raw theme) for some reason.