Schinckel.net

I had a training afternoon on Friday with Scholaris, and came across a few issues I found hard to work with.

• The first thing I noticed was that in lots of cases there were 2 buttons with the same name (usually Add) in the one window - when you said “click on Add”, I (and others) invariably clicked on the wrong one some of the time. Whilst most of the time this can be fixed, there was at least one instance where all settings could not be changed once this had been done. (Virtual Classrooms, cannot change theme once Add has been clicked). I think that more specific buttons names (“Add User”, “Create Virtual Classroom”) would create less confusion than relying on positional context alone.
• Another issue I came across was that in the Assignment Manager, it’s possible to drag one Target Group ‘into’ another. This results in some weird behaviour, that is difficult to describe. Basically, the top-level target group is then given a name that is a number, and contents are not accessible. You can delete this top level group, and then everything seems to be a bit more back to normal.
• The biggest issues for me were in the Content Editor, specifically to do with Images. When you insert an image, and then resize it, pressing Control-Z deletes the image, rather than un-resizing it. Secondly, I feel that the “Lock Ratio” button images should be reversed - it would make more sense that the image reflected the state of the function (ie, a locked image indicates that the aspect ratio is locked, not that clicking on the button will lock it). Another alternative would be a checkbox with “Lock Aspect Ratio” as the label. (I have written down that this function didn’t work anyway, but I can’t remember for sure).
• I also think that all windows should be resizable - in a couple of cases I had editing windows that only allowed me about 4 lines of text entry - which is generally not enough. Having to scroll all of the time, especially when I have a large monitor and this window takes up a small fraction of the available space, seems silly.
• Finally, I think that all “Preview” windows should have a “Close Preview” button. At times I wasn’t sure whether to click the close box or not: sometimes a new window is created, sometimes one isn’t (in the general context of Scholaris), and it would be much easier to see when in a Preview window if a specific “Close Preview” button/link was in these windows.