Designing the DrProject User Experience

During the last portion of my summer, Greg has asked me to think about what could be done to make ticketing or some other form of issue-tracking like a to-do list simple enough that students would bother to use it. For inspiration, I first poked around to see what agile project management software was doing for issue management. I’ll use this blog to document some of my analysis and ideas.

Mingle Card Wall

Greg mentioned Mingle to me, so that was my starting place. One of their neat ideas is to have a card wall. I had seen card walls used to track where a client was in a process before, but using it for tracking software issues and new features makes sense too.

If a professor sees it as important for students to be thinking about different steps in the development process, this is a good approach.  While Mingle has many steps, I think just a few such as Development, Testing, and Completed might be sufficient, with possible also Planning and Need Help. The Need Help column could put the students on the professor’s radar (this was an idea from one of the students I interviewed). The other great thing about this view is the simplicity. You’re not seeing a big table with all the details of each item, and yet, the details are available at a single click that gives you focus without losing the context.

(See also: Video including interaction with Mingle card wall.)

Hierarchy

During some further brainstorming, I realized that it would make sense in many projects to drill down deeper into more details as the semester goes on, breaking up larger items into the many pieces or resulting issues that are discovered as the learning process goes on. For instance, at the beginning of the semester you may only know that your final version must have a shopping cart, while a little later, you may realize that your shopping cart needs to be secure, calculate a subtotal of the cost of all the items in it, and calculate shipping. These ideas may also have sub-ideas.

Well, I thought that my friend and I were coming up with something unique, but it turns out Mingle also has “card trees” that allow you to organize cards into trees. Their idea is more restrictive, however, in that each level of the tree must be composed of a specified card type. I think a looser organization without necessarily “typing” the cards would be appropriate for students.  The visual organization and a drag-and-drop environment would make it effective an easy to use such a tool.

(See also: Mingle’s Card Tree Video)

To do lists plus labeling

While all these Web 2.0 things are pretty neat, and drag-and-drop interfaces make them relatively easy to learn, I think I favor an even simpler solution.  Check out  this quick demo of Basecamp’s to do lists. The cost of having such a simple system is that it only gives a limited level of organization; you have lists, and optionally, owners of each to-do item.

I would suggest taking something like Basecamp’s to do list and adding the smallest amount of other features necessary to serve students’ needs. We don’t want the system to get too busy and visually distracting. One suggestion that I have is to add a tagging or labeling system, similar to that used by Google Code and Gmail. Google Code takes labels one step beyond what I think most student groups would want by allowing categories of tags to be defined such as Priority, while Gmail keeps things simple and color-coded.

In-line editing

TargetProcess has in-line editing of lists – a must have for simplicity.

I have a mockup in progress that I’ll share soon, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts so far as a status update for this week.