Project Highlights to Date

• Established a strong community of expertise and interest in usability and accessibility in the open/community source environment
• Significant education and outreach activities: four U-Camps to date, as well as presentations and evangelism
• Created a Design Handbook to help open source communities improve user experience:
  • UX Walkthroughs, to help assess usability and accessibility
  • UI design patterns: advice and guidance on building effective user interfaces
  • User testing techniques and advice
• Worked with many communities to help with usability, accessibility, and JavaScript development requirements
• Pioneered new interactions for accessible drag and drop
• Created the Lightbox and Layout Customizer components and integrated them into several applications
• Established several primary strategies for the Fluid framework, including:
  • Unobtrusive, markup-driven components
  • Portal-safe markup binding
  • Keyboard navigation plugins
  • Support for multiple versions
• Released Fluid 0.1, including a diverse package of components, sample code, and documentation

Milestones and Deliverables

Community

• Established all of the communication infrastructure required by a health open source community:
  • Wiki
  • Issue tracker
  • Source code repository
  • Mailing lists
  • Continuous integration
  • Videoconferencing
    • Defined a comprehensive project roadmap, release plan, and component design strategy
    • Defined and implemented community procedures:
    • Security process
    • Commit access and voting
    • Licensing and contributor agreements

Design Handbook and Design

• User Experience Walkthroughs
  • Comprehensive protocols, checklist, and advice on how to do a UX Walkthrough
  • Substantial walkthroughs of Sakai, uPortal, and Moodle, including accessibility evaluations
  • Mentored the communities in doing their own UX Walkthroughs
• Contributed to the W3C's DHTML Style Guide working group, to help establish conventions for keyboard accessibility
• User interface design patterns
  • Created three new UI design patterns related to drag and drop
  • Established plan for the Open Source Design Patterns Library, the first truly open and collaborative repository for UI design patterns
  • Collaborated with other communities and industry partners on design pattern best practices
• Defined user testing and contextual inquiry procedures

Components

• Designed and developed the first Fluid component, the Lightbox
  • Integrated into the Sakai Image Gallery tool and the ATutor gallery module
• Designed and implemented the Sakai "My Active Sites" tab-based interface. This will serve as the basis for an upcoming reusable Fluid component.
  • Integrated into Sakai 2.5
• Designed and implemented the Layout Customizer, designed to provide customizable module layouts
  • Will be integrated into the post-3.0 release of uPortal
• Designed wireframes and spects for initial versions of new File Upload and Tagging components.
  • Will be implemented and released in Fluid 0.3 and 0.4.

Fluid DHTML Framework

• Built the first Fluid framework service, the Reorderer
  • Accessible, unobtrusive, highly reusable drag and drop
  • The backbone of the Lightbox and other Fluid components
  • Available within Sakai, and ATutor; will be integrated into uPortal's next release post-3.0
• Evaluated several JavaScript toolkits and widget sets for the following criteria, ultimately settling on jQuery
  • Unobtrusiveness and support for graceful degradation
  • Accessibility, UX design
  • Clarity and simplicity
• Developed a keyboard accessibility plugin for the jQuery JavaScript toolkit, making it significantly easier to add accessibility to DHTML interfaces
• Established an approach for allowing multiple versions of the Fluid framework to coexist on a single page. Essential for portal safety.

Releases

• Fluid 0.1 was release on November 30, 2007. The release contains:
  • Lightbox component
  • Reorderer framework service for accessible drag and drop
  • 3 UI design patterns offering advice about how to design for drag and drop
  • Protocols and guidance on how to do your own UX Walkthrough
  • Tons of sample code and documentation