01 April 2014, 13:31

I got a lot of great user feedback at the 2014 NZ Mahara Hui. And one of
the main things I heard from Mahara users was their concern about
usability. They wanted Mahara to be easier to learn, and more fun to
use, especially for kids.

So I consulted with some usability experts to find out how to engage
children with a software product. Time and again they all brought up the
best-of-class solution for this problem: the beloved animated office
product, Clippy the Paperclip.

Thanks to the good folks at the Clippy.js project it was a snap to integrate Clippy
into Mahara as a Block plugin. So now, you can add Clippy and all his
friends to any Mahara page.

The plugin is available on my github repository, and I've
also installed it on mahara.org for demo purposes. You can check it out
on my profile page, for instance: https://mahara.org/user/aaronw

What's next for Mahara and usability? Well, the other thing the
usability experts told me was that kids love fun fonts. So I'm working
on a theme that replaces every font in Mahara with Comic Sans.

Cheers,

Aaron

03 April 2014, 17:50

Okay, so this was my April Fool's Day joke. I've removed the plugin from mahara.org (sorry to the one other person who used it on a page! ).

For the record, this is a real working Mahara plugin. That picture in the previous post is an actual screenshot of the plugin in operation. And if you were so inclined you could in fact download this plugin from my github repo and install into your own Mahara 1.8 or 1.9 site to annoy and/or amuse your own users.

However, it will probably not be making it into core.

Cheers,

Aaron

05 April 2014, 7:43

Hi Aaron,

joke or not, this plugin definately has merit - core or not. I think it would make a great feature to guide new users thru the different features of a site. I am thinking perhaps I will make a 'new users' page or collection.

I notice from the screen shot that you do control location on a page which is great. Do you think alternating locations are possible? (Kind of like find Waldo) Do you think it might be possible to replace the displayed text message with HTML for a embeded video or link perhaps.

Anyhow, thank's for doing this. I think with some time and thinking, this could be the basis of a neat introductory activity in mahara.

Dirk

05 April 2014, 18:16

Hi Dirk,

Well, the original Clippy and other MS Office Assistants were, to quote Wikipedia, "widely reviled among users as intrusive and annoying". So you'd have to be careful not to have the same effect on your users. For whatever reason, many people tend to not like well-meaning cartoon characters guiding them through software wizards.

But, if you do want to try to do something with this, feel free, it's open source. Of course, if you were using this for real, you'd want to get rid of the Microsoft-copyrighted helpers and replace them with our own cartoon character. (One of my Catalyst co-workers suggested an animated Mahara logo. )

You could indeed expand this to respond to other locations or events on the screen. I just made it so that the block includes some Javascript that ties JQuery event handlers to mouseovers on a bunch of screen elements, and each event handler makes the helper do a random animation and then say a specific message. It would be possible to add more event handlers for other actions, and to make them respond to more complicated things.

One practical limitation to the plugin in its current form, is that it's a Block plugin. If you wanted it to help people through the site, it would really make more sense as a sideblock, but sideblocks are not yet a fully pluggable plugin type in Mahara, so that's why I didn't go that route.

Also the Clippy.JS library that I used as the basis of this, has some distinct problems and limitations, probably because it was written as a joke. The big one is that the text in the speech bubble loads up quite slowly. It's also limited to displaying only plaintext, not HTML. So, you'd need to fix those problems (I think the slow text is on purpose to simulate the real Microsoft Office Agent) or use a different library for this.

Cheers,

Aaron