Apparent Progress Toward a More Usable Sakai

Sakai has had some fairly serious usability problems since its inception. The development community has been aware of these problems for some time; however, the efforts toward improving the situation have been sporadic and fragile to date. Today, I’m happy to point to some tangible signs that this is changing, and that we have a good chance of seeing some real improvement starting with the next release.

To start with, Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska has announced in his blog that the Foundation Board has re-started a project that is aimed at delivering usability improvements to the platform within six months. The description of the project can be found here. Note that the email thread of the Board members discussing the project has been reproduced in the comments section at the bottom of the page. (Yay for transparancy!)

In said email thread, Michael specifically mentions a desire to have their project “interact with Fluid in a meaningful way.” For those of you who don’t know, Fluid is an effort to improve user experience across multiple open source higher education projects. Recently, Fluid published their own list of usability problems in Sakai based on a heuristic usability review that they performed. (If you want to know more about what a ‘heuristic usability review’ is, I suggest reading some of Jacob Neilsen’s very accessible writings on the topic.) There are a lot of good findings in this first review, including some low-hanging fruit.

The next critical question will be whether the Sakai community can execute by integrating these sorts of usability inputs into their normal release scoping prioritization. Improving usability needs to be a routine part of every release process.

“Inch by inch, row by row….”