I was the lucky student chosen for the DrProject Season of Usability project this summer. In this blog I’ll write about some of the challenges I encounter.

DrProject is a project management portal derived from Trac, primarily intended to be better for use in the classroom by offering multiple projects on one installation amongst other improvements.

The main challenge I face this summer is redesigning the administrative interface for DrProject. Luckily for me, Qiyu Zhu will be doing the difficult part (in my opinion), the implementation. He’s already gotten a great start by implementing a role and capability manager. See his latest blog entry for more details on that. In discussing the design with Qiyu, I did have a cool idea for grouping capabilities in tabs, but it was a little late coming, would be more difficult to implement, and we have some higher priority tasks to concentrate on within the administration panel.

In addition to thinking hard on how to redesign the administrative panel, I’ve been chatting with some of the other DrProject summer interns about the interface design for their projects. They have some pretty cool ideas in the works. For instance, Nick Jamil is redesigning the ticketing interface to be much more flexible and Kosta Zabashta is integrating DrProject with IRC, which entails a bot that can interact with users in the chat (for instance, spitting out links to tickets upon request) and logs the conversation to make it accessible for future use. Greg Wilson also got me thinking about one of the most pesky usability problems DrProject has, the “All” project

Hopefully now that I’ve entered into the DrProject blogging world, you should be hearing from me regularly. (”Better late than never” refers to both my slow start at blogging and a hint at the amount of reworking I foresee to make DrProject a more user-friendly portal.)  For a sneak peek at the first sketches of overhauling the admin panel, see this mockup.  More to come soon!

I also wanted to add a special thanks to my mentors, Paula Bach (usability) and Greg Wilson (technical) for their guidance this summer. I’m really happy to be collaborating with you and all the students and developers working on DrProject!