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.
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.