Thoughts on Navigation in dotLRN
I see the major challenge of navigation in a reasonable
balance between
- aggregating items from the groups (green, Sienna) into the
users' My Space (blue), vs.
- customizing the user's My Space more cautiously, leaving
them room to personalize it for themselves.
For instance, to urge users having all FAQ's from
all
their groups aggregated on their home page, or folders from
all groups on their "my" folders page, is not equally useful
as aggregating calendar entries. Of course
users may ban these
portlets completely. But some in-between variant may be the
desired way to go
, perhaps just customizing a link to the FAQ's
into some recommended links' portlet "Links for YOU", or
offering the link for personalization into one's "My Links"
collection.
If the transparency about what is My and what is Ours is
not maintained, the orientation is lost.
This is especially important since "My Space" competes for
the role of the most important, "desktop"-like, personal
focal point with the user's local desktop, leaving dotLRN at
most the role of an outpost desktop, and
the notion of "space" is obviously not understood by most
users. (The foggy cloud on the
image should foreshadow this problem. The label "My Space"
should therefore probably be replaced by "Home" but is kept
in this navigational discussion to show the original intention
of the concept.)
To do
The optimal tradeoff between
- short clickpaths (with the extreme of no click
at all if the information is propagated into a webpart),
- and orientation (via clearly distinct groups' and personal
regions, connected, of course, with shortcut links)
should be analysed for each of the major applications.
Not every technical possibility to propagate dynamic data
right into one's My Space is what class admin want
to have for their students, and they must be able to
switch it off (replace it by just links), and they should
be offered reasonable defaults.
For some portlets the aggregation question seems already
rather clear to me.
- Calendar: Ok
- Filestore: No;
- Groups/Subgroups and Forums: forget this distinction,
and customize just on link (group or forum), because having
both equally named links is always again irritating even
if you know exactly what you want to do.
- News: Only headlines should be allowed to be urged onto
the My Space.
Other navigation issues
Mainly hierarchy problems:
- Subgroups confusion
- Class catalog inflexibility
- audiences/rights confusion
- breadcrumbs (just technical click path hierarchy rather
than designated presentation paths).
Matthias, 9.6.04