Short update on the MarkUs UI/UX design work

After finishing the prototypes for the grader assignment view, I moved on to re-designing the group formation tab.  Here are some prototypes:

Group Formation: Adding a student to a group

Group Formation: Removing a student from an existing group

Group Formation: Filtering -- Only show valid group formations

Group Formation: Filtering -- Only show invalid group formations

They can also be found on the MarkUs project blog here.  These prototypes will be used in a simple usability session this week, and I will be reworking these prototypes according to the usability feedback we get from the session.  More updates to come! :D

Last week, a small group of MarkUs team members spent a good hour in the #markus IRC channel going through my first batch of prototypes.  We also took this opportunity to hammer out some of the usability issues in the current release of MarkUs.  So instead of putting together meeting minutes for this UI/UX meeting, I decided to put together a usability design report that laid out the issues discussed, what our next steps are, and what the rationale is behind these design decisions.

Professor Karen Reid and I just went through this design plan, and it is now posted on the MarkUs project blog.  Please check it out here.

Last week, I noticed how my WordPress.com Stats plugin stopped recording stats for my blog.  It didn’t lose any data from the past — it simply stopped tracking new visitors and traffic.  So my stats looked something like this:

After a bit of poking around, I found a thread in the WordPress forum that had a fix to the problem.  I’m not sure why my footer was missing the following line, but here’s the fix:

In footer.php, make sure you have this line:

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

Before these lines:

</body>
</html>

Hope this helps!

Thanks to Professor Diane Horton, I’ve been recognized as a woman making a difference at the University of Toronto!  My profile has been posted here!

The eighteenth Toronto Girl Geek Dinner will be held this coming Monday, January 25th at Fionn MacCools. Ladies, if you’re interested, more information can be found here.

Leigh Honeywell will be speaking at the event.  She’s had a ton of experience in IT security and is an amazing (and inspiring) speaker — I’ve attended her presentations a few times, and she’s got lots of experience and knowledge to share (as well as interesting stories).  Leigh is the co-founder and director of HackLab.TO, attended the University of Toronto, and is a mentor for the Google Summer of Code program.  So she’s definitely somebody you’d want to meet!

As for me, I’m definitely going to go if work and school permits.

And yes, this is a ladies night out — sorry gents!