Allison Bloodworth, ETS—Learning Systems
Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open-source projects (including uPortal, Moodle, Kuali Student Services System, and Sakai, which is the basis for UC Berkeley's bSpace learning management system), with a focus on academic software for universities. To achieve these goals, the Fluid project is creating a collection of sharable user-interface components (created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), which will be presented along with a collection of design patterns. These design patterns will help designers and developers determine how best to use Fluid's components in the particular context in which they are working in their application. In addition, Fluid is creating the User Experience Toolkit which will include advice, guidelines, and templates that can be used with several different user-centered design methods. Information on personas, contextual inquiry, user testing, design patterns, and more can also be found in the User Experience section of the Fluid wiki. For more information on the origins and initial months of the Fluid project, see UC Berkeley ETS receives Mellon Grant for the Fluid project, a community source UI project.
The members and volunteers of the Fluid project have been busy over the last several months. The Fluid Summit was held at the end of September 2007. This allowed many members of the community to meet each other for the first time while collaborating on several tasks that were easier to work on face-to-face. The whole group discussed the project release plan and vision together. Then the groups split into two different tracks: technical, and user experience (UX). The technical group worked on the Fluid architecture plan, which defines the framework that will serve as the underlying user-interface layer across applications. They also held a coding session to begin integrating the first Fluid framework service, the Reorderer, into uPortal's drag-and-drop layout manager. The Reorderer is a set of JavaScript objects that can be used by developers to create rich, accessible user interfaces that allow users to move and rearrange content on the page using either a mouse or keyboard.
Prior to the summit, many members of the Fluid community participated in user experience (UX) walkthroughs of the Fluid applications in an effort to determine the most common and troublesome "pain points" across applications. At the summit, the UX group processed these results in order to formulate recommendations on which Fluid components should be developed in the future (see User-centered design in IT services: Case studies). The UX walkthroughs also gave the group baseline information on the current state of usability and accessibility in the Fluid applications.
The Fluid project also recently made an important improvement to Sakai's tabbed navigational structure. The team made usability improvements to a new feature created by Indiana University. This feature allows users to view and navigate to a categorized list of all their worksites in a single interface, and replaces the drop-down list of "More" sites, which users of Sakai see when they have more worksites than the allowed number of tabs. The Fluid team made usability improvements to this feature by designing and building the My Active Sites interface, which was integrated into Sakai 2.5. Users of bSpace should expect see this new feature this summer.
During the months of November and December, many members of the Fluid project gave presentations at and participated in the JA-SIG unconference (of which uPortal is a member) and the Sakai conference. A U-Camp, which is an interactive conference session focused on "user experience", "usability", and "user-centered design", was also held at both conferences. Information on what was discussed at the U-Camps can be found on the JA-SIG wiki and the Sakai wiki. U-Camps are an important part of the outreach and evangelism aspect of the Fluid project. They are an opportunity to teach others in the Fluid communities about design and development practices which can be used to help improve their applications' usability and accessibility.
Perhaps the biggest recent accomplishment for the Fluid project was the release of Fluid 0.1 on November 30, 2007. This release contained: the Reorderer framework service for accessible drag and drop; the Lightbox component, which implements the Reorderer in Sakai's Image Gallery tool, allowing users to reorder images in a "Lightbox" (a screen containing a collection of the user's images); three user-interface design patterns offering advice on how to design for drag-and-drop from Fluid's newly created Open Source Design Pattern Library; protocols and guidance on how to do your own UX walkthrough; and lots of sample code and documentation.
The Fluid project is continuing to work on new and exciting UI components, the User Experience Toolkit, and the Open Source Design Pattern Library. You can see the group's entire roadmap for the next year in the Fluid Project 2007–2009 Release Plan. The deliverables of the Fluid project will be helpful to many UC Berkeley designers and developers, and the open community welcomes your input and involvement! Get involved by visiting the Fluid wiki, joining our mailing lists, reading the Fluid blog, downloading the latest Fluid release or other available source code, or contacting the Educational Technology Services staff members working on the project listed below.
For more details about this project, see the Fluid project website, or contact Allison Bloodworth, Daphne Ogle, or Eli Cochran,
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