Building Capacity Through Good Usability: Lessons from Instructional Design

SESSION OVERVIEW
Web development in Drupal increasingly involves “capacity building” by giving users a toolkit to design the experiences they want for their audience. In instructional design, this means providing teachers with web-based collaborative tools that allow them to design learning spaces for their students.

Drawing on case studies from using Drupal in an academic setting, this session will highlight some practical usability techniques that can help develop capacity among users:

• Designing a better WYSIWYG experience
• Providing easy ways to build navigation
• Ways to embed common user tasks in more meaningful contexts

The session will also suggest ways that Drupal as a project might help build capacity among designers and developers by providing better built-in frameworks for effective usability practices.

TRACK
Design and User Experience

AGENDA
* An overview using Drupal in an instructional design setting
* Case studies in how we have used Drupal to develop teaching resource repositories and wiki applications for faculty.
* Practical lessons learned in capacity building among instructors
* An open discussion of ideas for how Drupal could be structured to support better UX design.

GOALS
This session aims to provide a few practical usability strategies for capacity building in Drupal, and it will invite discussion on how Drupal could provide frameworks to help designers and developers improve user experience.

RESOURCES
No prior experience or knowledge is required but an interest in Drupal user experience issues will be helpful.