Forum OpenACS Development: Re: .LRN user interface design

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45: Re: .LRN user interface design (response to 43)
Posted by Bruce Spear on 06/05/04 01:28 PM
I like the illustration of the breadcrumbs, but I wonder how many levels we might be talking about?  This might best be answered with a query: anybody find themselves more than four levels deep? Might page names appearing in the breadcrumbs be shortened to accommodate this?  Are we talking a manageable 4 levels 99% of the time and 5 levels for sysadmins, who can be expected not to worry about it?

On the right top: how often do we switch languages compared to using the help and logging out?  Languages is a wonderful design feature, but I'd suspect it is used seldom (ok, another query, how often do we switch languages?) and might better be put in the Control Panel to simplify things a bit, leaving room for something else we use more often or to let in more light and air.  Or?

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48: Re: .LRN user interface design (response to 45)
Posted by Lars Pind on 06/07/04 04:05 PM
Funky note about switching language: The situation that we want to think about is the situation where you're seeing a page in a language which you don't understand at all, you want to have a link to change it.

Of course, a generic "Change language" link in the currently selected language isn't going to help you any, so what we need [is something like what Joel (http://aufrecht.org/) has at the bottom of his page. In fact, that's what we did for our CSS'ification:

http://cph02.collaboraid.net:8064/dotlrn/static

We'll ask for a formal review once we're complete (should be by Wednesday), but if you have feedback on the HTML or CSS at this point, please do speak up. We've tried to make this as lean and generically skinnable as possible.

(We're still missing some parts, including the 2-column layout for the portal.)

.LRN has a problem with very deep breadcrumb trails. A class generally has a breadcrumb trail like so:

Main Site » dotLRN » Subjects » Business Administration » MBA 101 » MBA 101

"Subjects" is a page that lists all departments.

"Business Adminstration" is a page that lists all subjects in the business administration department.

The first "MBA 101" is a page that lists all classes with the MBA 101 subject (which is typically rather meaningless, given that for most subjects, only one class will be active at any time, namely the one in the current term.

I think we'll need to tidy up this hierarchy quite a bit. Though that is a deep fix, since this is related to how .LRN mounts package instances in the site map. :(

/Lars