Based on previous feedback from students and staff using DIVERSE we have made a number of changes to DIVERSE. So to keep everyone up to speed l decided to write this blog post to keep everyone updated with what has been happening lately.
Firstly DIVERSE is in full swing in terms of its deployment to faculties and is being actively used by computing students currently. The hope is to have classes from other faculties using it regularly in the near future.
From a more technical perspective DIVERSE has seen a number of overhauls aimed at improving usability for users of DIVERSE. These changes have been heavily driven by the feedback we have received from users.
These changes include the new more user friendly and SEO (search engine optimised) links.This means rather than having to go to diverse.lincoln.ac.uk/application/index.php?module=101&topic=hello-world which is difficult to remember and also bad from a security perspective. Instead clouds can be accessed in the following manner: http://diverse.lincoln.ac.uk/module/101/topic/hello-world, which is much cleaner and simpler. This may however change in the near future to become http://diverse.lincoln.ac.uk/101/hello-world, depending on user feedback.
The second usability change is that resource clouds themselves have been made to fit more consistently with the rest of the project website; consistency was an issue raised by many users. This means that all DIVERSE pages share the same header and footer allowing users constant access to key parts of the project website e.g. support, documentation etc.
Following on from this, the add page functionality has also been reworked and updated. The new system involves a 2 step process. Firstly the user fills out the URL as normal:
Step 1 for adding a resource
Then if necessary the user is taken to a second step in which an image selection form is presented, the aim of this is to help reduce the number of default icons being used and to ultimately make resource clouds look more varied and useful to users.
Add a resource step 2
In addition there have also been some smaller additions made to DIVERSE, these include the inclusion of a profile page and cloud list page which allow users to see the clouds they have access to currently. As well as this as part of the research aspect of DIVERSE a statistics page has been created which presents the data DIVERSE is collecting in a more user friendly manner. An example of part of the stats section can be seen below:
Statistics
Stay tuned for more updates and news.
