15 January 2025, 13:59

Hello,

Welcome to the first post in the usability forum! We'd like to get your opinion on a couple of our content types, namely 'Text' and 'Note'. Some quick questions before I give you a bit of background in case you are interested in a bit of Mahara history.

• Do you use both or do you use one more than the other (either yourself or on your site in general)?
• What functionalities can you not live without?
• Do you create a note and repurpose it on other pages to update simultaneously?

Now for the historical background...

Initially, we only had a block called 'Text box'. There you could add text and that was it. The text only lived on a page, and if you wanted to use it on another page, you had to copy and paste it. That's why the 'Note' was introduced later on so that you could repurpose a note that was created on one page on many other pages. This was very useful at the time because you could pop instructions into the block and change them across multiple pages in one go. However, it also caused problems when a portfolio author didn't read the alert carefully and accidentally replaced their note content with other content and thus changed multiple pages at once.

So we needed a simple text option again that didn't come with all the options that were on the note, and hence, the 'Text' block was created that did not allow for reusability and needed to be changed on a page. This content type became more important and more used for some of our clients so that it received additional attention and now also has advanced options like 'Instructions' and 'Quick edit' to make it possible to update the content without going into full 'Edit' mode, preventing that the layout is changed.

In our mission to make Mahara easier to use, we are wondering if we still need both options or if we can combine them into one and maybe even drop some functionality, in particular the option to use the same note content in another page and have it updated there when it's updated on the first page.

The registration data does not reveal that level of detail to us and thus we'd love to hear from you!

Thank you

Kristina