When asked to redesign the Interface for the popular open-source community and learning management system: .LRN, I encountered the joys and challenges of working with a globally open source development team. Herein I include some of the story, screenshots, and an update on the progress and current usage of the final product "Selva".
In May of 2005, I attended the Open Software Forum of the OnlineEduca conference in Madrid. There I presented a paper outlining an Accessibility evaluation of the Learning Management System .LRN and took part in a bug bash with .LRN developers who had come from far and wide for the conference. At the bug bash, we were able to work through the checkpoints, one by one, that were outlined in the evaluation, and thus, brought .LRN an inch away from Accessibility compliance, which it achieved soon after.During the conference, interface and usability consistently emerged as concerns for everyone. In collaboration with a focus group of developers from Guatemala and MIT, we developed a plan to launch a new interface based on more user-friendly concepts and the idea of a warm and flexible environment. The concept was dubbed Selva (which means rainforest in Spanish), and I went forward to design an interface. the new Selva interface incorporated key changes to the information architecture (in the form of new tab labels and section reorganization) as well as a warmer more sophisticated aesthetic.
Advantages
- Team: The group of people involved in the development and planning of .LRN made the experience a great one and made our achievements possible. .LRN has and continues to draw from a rich pool of talent from around the world, beginning with its roots at MIT and now extending throughout the world into Europe, Australia, Asia and Latin America.
- The Event: The conference was essential in that it put a disperate group of people in the same place at the same time which catalyzed efforts and provided the momentum necessary to make a large number of changes in a short time.
Challenges
- Management: .LRN is a big system, and it's democratically run. As a very large long-standing open source project, changes and improvements rely on the collaboration and approval of a large number of people. This is less of an obstacle for developers creating or updating plug-in functionalities. This was much more of a challenge working on that which necessarily effects everything else (the interface). As a designer working in relative isolation, the difficulty in getting changes incorporated into the core and the necessary reliance on others was often an obstacle to how much could be achieved. The great frustration is when you've made this great improvement, and created the files but you just can't get it implemented. There was much that never came to life and ideas that were never fully implemented. Nevertheless, a significant number of changes did get implemented, such that the overall improvement was still great.
- Separation of form and content: The templating system allows for much flexibility but it was built before CSS and web standards were the norm. This made a new template design much trickier and meant I required developer time to implement design changes, which was hard to come by. Since then concerted efforts have been made to make the interface entirely css which should make future efforts much more effective.
Results
The resulting Selva skin was included as a default option in the .LRN installation. It was also picked up and customized by other institutions.
