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