Trello's Innovative Approach to the Newbie Learning Experience

The project management program Trello is simple, powerful, free and highly recommended.  One of the secrets to their masterful design for both the user experience and the learning experience, is the fun and creative approach they take to progressive disclosure.  The idea of progressive disclosure it that you release information or features gradually rather than all at once so as not to overwhelm the user or learner.

In order to keep the experience of finding your feet in the program fun and simple, Trello shows great respect (and support) for cognitive load by removing some of its features for the first-time user.  As you gain proficiency rapidly by playing around with the features that are available, small contextualized hints begin to appear to suggest there's more to this program than you thought at first glance.  Click to add a due date, for example, and the calendar reads "enable the calendar power-up to see your project in calendar mode".  

Holding back on the calendar feature not only keeps it out of the way, thus allowing new users  to focus on the basics first, but also, positioning it as a "power-up" bestows the extra value of an exciting bonus feature. The game reference is also a nod to the user's progress in mastering the program since in games, power-ups become available with mastery.

Kudos to Trello for the creative mix of progressive disclosure and game style for a great newbie learning experience. 

Real Learning gains with iPads in Primary School

Photo from the onebillion project.

Three cheers for the onebillion project and EuroTalk Software whose carefully crafted math programs for students in Malawi  have shown to triple math knowledge in 8 weeks compared to standard practice.  Attention to instructional and interface design tailored to local needs has no doubt played a critical role.  The University of Nottingham's Randomized Controlled Trial is a useful example of a thorough evaluation process for eLearning.

I asked the project team how they charge the iPads which can, of course, be a prohibitive issue for many without reliable sources of electricity.  For the test school, they created a charging station for 25 tablets in the one office with electricity. Now they're setting up solar charging stations with panels on the roof which will have the capacity to charge 25 iPads overnight.  Where there's a will and creativity, there's a way.

The onebillion project has created math learning apps available in many different languages including an English language 3-5 maths app.

Read more about the program and the onebillion project.

Europe's treasures at your fingertips

Europeana is an astounding mega-library of cultural artefacts from VanGogh paintings, and Newton's laws of motion to sheet music, letters and historical photographs.  What's really impressive is that these artifacts are nested in the knowledge and inspiring stories that surround them.

All in the public domain!

"Explore millions of items from a range of Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Books and manuscripts, photos and paintings, television and film, sculpture and crafts, diaries and maps, sheet music and recordings, they’re all here."
"Found something you like? Download it, print it, use it, save it, share it, play with it, love it!"

They've done a beautiful job with the presentation of this treasure (for example, they hold regular digital exhibitions and update a blog which features items of daily relevance).
Surely, this is what the internet is all about. 

Check it out:  www.europeana.eu

Gaming for science

Supporting cancer research is undoubtedly important, but playing computer puzzle games is undoubtedly more fun.  The makers of Foldit have literally managed to combine the two by building a game around the problem of deciphering protein structures, and then letting this scientific challenge loose on the world.

Fold-It takes crowdsourcing and educational gaming up a serious notch. Not only do budding scientists (or the armchair variety like myself) get to learn about what it takes to fold a protein, they get to be part of serious research and discovery.  In fact, it has already worked.

In 2011, FoldIt players deciphered the crystal structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, marking the game's first major scientific discovery.  Overtime, players could conceivably make discoveries that contribute to treatments for AIDS, Alzheimer's, or to better biofuels.  No, mom, I really am saving the world.

Foldit is just one of many interesting jewels spawned at the University of Washington's Centre for Game Science, which "focuses on solving hard problems facing humanity today in a game based environment".  Now, that's what I'm talkin' about. They do this, primarily, by combining what computers do best with what humans do best (creative puzzle solving, for example, which is leveraged en masse with Foldit).   So go play their other games.  No guilt required.

Extreme Accessibility - How to save lives with eLearning

Far from the typical audience of corporate or university eLearning, Thare Machi Education designs lessons on topics like human trafficking and cholera for learners who are extremely poor, mostly illiterate, totally unfamiliar with technology and speak hundreds of different languages.  How's that for a brief?

Francotoile - language learning with video

FrancoToile is a showcase in presentation simplicity. It's a resource for French language learners, created  in Canada that leverages what web video has to offer to expose learners to the various sounds, dialects and slang of native French speakers from diverse communities across the globe.

Online Educational Games

Online games for kids that teach skills in math, science and language arts are available for free at arcademicskillbuilders.com. This University of Kansas based initiative also features a plethora of other online teacher resources via 4Teachers.org (just check out the drop down at the top right of the screen). Kudos to the folks at ALTEC, U. of Kansas.

Interface Design Case Study - Sakai LMS

Recently I was asked to design a new Interface for the popular open-source community and learning management system, Sakai. Herein I include some of the challenges, take a look at the before and after screenshots, and provide an update on progress and current usage of the final product the "Amistad" skin.



In June, I had the opportunity to work on a project for CARET (the Centre for Advanced Research in Educational Technologies), to design a more user-friendly and inviting interface for the Sakai system in use at the University. Sakai is a collaboration and learning management system used by many to "support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration."

As an ongoing open source project, there are continual improvements being made and functionalities being added. In June of 2006, CARET was interested in making improvements to the usability and user interface.

Spec

• The instructions were to create an interface that wasn't drastically different from the current (maintained familiarity for current users and held to a generally minimal aesthetic) but was more friendly, inviting and usable. The client described the current design as too boxy and technical and were looking for a "rounder" more "humanities friendly" design.
• The time and resources alloted for this project allowed for a strictly superficial facelift. changes were made only to the CSS and imagery and only existing CSS classes where effected.

Advantages

• CSS and web standards: Due to excellent work and planning on the part of the Sakai developers, the interface/template system is built on web standards and pure css. Unlike other interfaces I have worked on, in Sakai, the skin CSS was a beauty: It was clean, standards compliant and the classes were consistent and well described with comments throughout. This made all the difference, and indeed, was the reason I was able to create a new skin in a week.

Challenges

• I discovered that only some (a mniority) of the image files used for the interface were available within the technical jurisdiction of the template. This meant, that many of the images I wanted to improve were inaccessible system files. Any changes would have to be overall changes made to the system - not skinnable. That was a shame. For example, I discovered that the usability of the file storage system was extremely confusing, and could be drastically improved by just redesigning the folder icons so I created alternatives but they couldn't be implemented with the skin.

Results

The resulting skin, which I called "Amistad" was subsequently included as a default option with the following Sakai installations. It was also picked up and customized by other institutions.
The detailed work log provides more process information and the resulting 'Amistad' skin is available for download online.

Interface Design Case study - the .LRN interface

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.