Usability evaluation and redesign of Educational Platform



Technical University of Crete
Login screen of the Mole educational platform.
Figure 1: Login screen of the "Mole" educational platform.


In this project I evaluated the Mole Educational Platform that was developed in the MUSIC Lab Mole is an extension of the main learning management system (very similar to Moodle) used for course support of all the courses in the ECE Department of the Technical University of Crete. Mole was developed as part of a European Union project in order to support a number of European organizations through international projects.
The platform supports social networks, collaboration, synchronized multimedia presentations, knowledge generation, and other functionality.
As part of a Human-Computer Interaction undergraduate course, I conducted an extensive Heuristic Evaluation and Usability Aspect Report based on Jacob Nielsen and Deborah Mayhew guidelines, as well as Think Aloud evaluations with video recordings carried out by two test Users (Educators, junior and senior). The findings were documented in the resulting Usability Aspect Report and analysis.


A screenshot of a user’s screen during the Think Aloud Evaluation
Figure 2: A screenshot of a user’s screen during the Think Aloud Evaluation.


In the second phase of this project me and my team-mate redesigned parts of the Mole Educational Platform used by course administrators, namely Student Enrolment, Course Settings, Grades, Labs, and Lectures. In doing so we dealt with usability issues described in our reports and provided new functionality that we envisioned would be beneficial to the users.
The designs produced were three proposed versions of the system in the form of Paper Prototypes. These prototypes were subsequently evaluated through Cognitive Walkthroughs in order to select the best version and re-designing it. The selected and redesigned version was transformed into a medium fidelity prototype (interactive Power Point) as a demonstrator. The project was presented to the designers of the actual Mole platform and my project was ranked as the best in my class.

A screenshot of the interactive Powerpoint Prototype
Figure 3: A screenshot of the interactive Powerpoint Prototype.