Feedback for Colleagues

Project Kick-off Feedback:

1. While I understand that I am focusing within the red area of the page, I feel like we must acknowledge the structure of the rest of the page. While I am not familiar with this tool, it should still be clear to me what is the page that I am looking at (and perhaps this is also just an inaccurate screenshot?). I’ve been told that this is the homepage of a course page but it also looks like it could be the Home Page for Courses in general. I would suggest either an update to the section titles or a layout restructure with proper content hierarchy.
    
2. Related to my first comment, I see three different “Home Page” titles (Figure 1) all in the same area and for all I know, refer to the same “Home Page”. If this is not true, I would recommend redefining the titles to better describe what they are representing or follow my suggestion in my first feedback item.
    

   FIGURE 1: Three Different “Home Pages”
   
    

   FIGURE 2: Current page structure hierarchy from 1 to 3:
   
    

   FIGURE 3: Possible second structure option (hierarchy from 1 to 3):
   
    

   This possible page structure provides extra space for the main content section of the page and hides/organizes redundant navigation items. However, since I am meant to focus on the content within the red box, I won’t go any further into page restructuring.

3. Regarding the “Instructor Feedback”: While the feedback is useful, it seems to be the perspective of one instructor and their persecutive might not reflect the majority or target user audience. I would want to work with colleagues to acquire stronger feedback data before making any drastic user-interface changes. However, for the sake if this exercise, I will address all feedback items.
    
4. For a mobile version of this page, I would also want to work with colleagues to define what features mobile users would want/need to use and possibly what features might not apply to mobile users.

Follow-up questions/comments from instructor’s feedback

1. I never use Tasks in my course, but I use Announcements nearly every day. Can you make the Announcements box bigger?
   While making the announcements box larger might not be the best solution, would would push to find out is re-ordering boxes or hide them as on option would be a good solution?

 

2. I don’t understand how to remove the boxes I don’t need.
   I agree that removing boxes could possibly be a bit more obvious and I might have a solution for this (see below mockup).

 

3. Students already get notifications about things that are new and need their attention from their global navigation tool and in email alerts. Why are these boxes still here?
   While notifications may show up within the global navigation, it is important to stay consistent and also display these calls to action on the homepage (which provides summarized section information) as well and possibly providing more details than the global navigation does. However, there are ways that this content could be re-structured and organized to seem less redundant.

 

4. I teach a fully online course, and I need this page to be more engaging to my students. Can I brand it?
   Regarding additional branding, I would be interested as to what elements the instructor would want to control. While we would want to keep the general look-and-feel consistent with the rest of the web tool, there could be some possible branding solutions for class pages.

 

5. This page makes my course look old and clunky. 
   While I agree that some elements of the page look old and clunky, we would need to define what content is important first and then brainstorm some alternate layout structures and dynamic functionality.

 

6. We use a twitter hashtag to communicate as a class – can you add a box for that?
   While the twitter box request seems to have some administrative usability questions, if approved, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be a box or section for social media features.

 

7. I expect my students to be logged in to our class virtual “meeting room” chat whenever they’re in the online course. Right now, it’s too many clicks so they don’t do it.
   Since chat rooms are class specific we would need to create a solution that would allow shortcut access to specified features like a class chat room. Possible solutions could be to have a global chat feature in the header that would list active classes in a drop-down or somehow utilize the global navigation with a chat feature.

 

8. I love the new photo roster tool! It helps me so much, and my students love it. Can you put that on this page?  
   Before adding the photo roster tool to the home page, we should first brainstorm why and how the tool would be useful there. Perhaps it would only show a photo of the instructor and then the number of students while providing a link to the photo roster page but I would not recommend trying to list every student. I would also want to be careful spotlighting smaller groups or individuals within the class.