 Okay, so, thanks for all coming here and joining in. Really, like I posted your follow-up post in the theme forum, you may not have read, but it doesn't matter. That this meeting is pretty much just sort of a – get together, share some concerns, hear each other a bit. I want to hear what you think and try and set some parameters and also try and think about the next couple of months and what that might look like and where you want to be involved. So, we have very clearly a problem in Moodle where people look at Moodle out of the box and they say, wow, this looks old. That's a very frequent thing that I hear. And that, you know, Moodle's functional. It works out of the box. It looks okay. But there's clearly a very big – there's a big industry around improving that, you know, that gap between what people would like to see and what Moodle is. So, we have a lot of you making themes. Some of you have businesses making themes, which is totally great. Some of you work at Moodle Partners and do a lot of themes. Some of you do it on your own. Some of you are helping with core themes. Well, let's switch off your microphones if – mute yourself. I don't know if I can mute everyone. I'm hearing some major noise from somewhere. There we go. I think I got it. So, yeah, there is this gap. We're filling the gap. A lot of people are doing that. And you know, a lot of you, like I know, that Moodle can look amazing with a lot of work put into it. You can make themes that do incredible things. And some of the themes out there are great. You know, Snap at Moodle Rooms is a big one that they've put a lot of effort in. I think there's some really great stuff in there that works. Personally, some things in there don't work for me. And it's the same with every single attempt that anyone's done, that there are things that work, things that don't. When you simplify Moodle's interface, you necessarily usually throw out – you throw out things. Hello. Maybe you can try and get this screen happening up there because it wasn't for me. And we necessarily throw some things out. And I want to be careful we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater with themes. For certain sites, it makes sense. For certain types of sites, it makes sense. For Moodle Core, it doesn't. For Moodle Core, we need to have all the functionality in the theme. So there's that. So the task that I see, that I want to set here, is how do we make a theme for Moodle 3.2 that is modern, that has the feel that everyone is looking for, that simplicity of navigation doesn't throw away any features and doesn't require Moodle plug-in programmers to do anything very different. So the current plug-ins still work. Something in the 3.2 timeframe, so we only have a few months, which is not really long. And from a user point of view, that's for me the most important thing. Along with that, and to achieve some of that, there's a lot of technical things under the hood that we need to do that will help themers and all of you in general. So, and that's where we get to CSS, JavaScript, and all of the other things, the new frameworks, the CSS in particular. And how do we do that? So that's where I'm trying to do here. I see this is Moodle HQ leading at the project, so we'll be actually combining code and bringing it together. We have a number of thoughts and some prototypes already, but we need as much input from people as we can. And the sort of input I'm thinking about is some of you may have already had prototypes that meet some of these goals. Some of you might have already got, have tried some things and showed they worked or don't work. And some of you might be interested in testing and giving feedback and fixes along the way and we'll be developing this open repository and so on. So, Damian's been taking kind of points on this as the team lead. And I'll hand over to him to talk about some of the details. But the main document that we've got together with the ideas is this one in docs. And I'll just share it. This is still obviously, well, that is bizarre. Okay. This is obviously, it's still in progress, this document and it's a summary. So I guess if we go through it, before I go through it, has anybody got any comments on the overall aim, any thoughts? Is this something doomed to fail from the start? Is it a great idea and it's about time? What are you thinking? Got any thoughts? Yes, you are right. I think it's long overdue. Sorry, I'd cut you off there, I think. Yeah, certainly for a lot of our customers too. It's a big buying decision when, you know, we're up against, you know, the Chabos and the sum totals, the new Adobe products, these sorts of things. It's like a meal, really. It's like people sort of buy what they see on the plate. Whereas what they see on the plate with the noodle may be very good, but it's sort of stale bread, so to speak. So they like a little bit of potato to the side and some greens and a nice sauce, which is what needs to happen in a theme, I think. And I definitely don't want to threaten anyone's livelihood with themes. What I see this is just kind of raising the baseline of what's expected. The baseline is good and then themes can just go even higher from there. So I think that's good. Anyone else? So I think someone, there were some other people talking. Yeah, it's me. I just wanted to say that I think what you're doing is great because this is what I envisaged when we went into 2.1. Yeah. I mean, I think you went the wrong way when you did Bootstrap. You should have kept Bootstrap as the main theme. Would have been easy. We still have Bootstrap as the, it's still currently the basis of the default theme. Yeah, but I mean using clean theme is like a standard theme. Hmm. Oh, okay. You could have just used that. Yeah. Thanks, Mary. Nice to see you, Mary, anyway. Nice to see you. Anyone else? I should add that we're looking at the same thing. Martin, it's going to help a lot of young people coming into Moodle, I think. If Moodle itself has the exact same basis as the project you've just been working on in Drupal. If Moodle itself has the exact same basis as the project you've just been working on in pretty much any modern CMS. Open Moodle and straight away, you're like, I recognize this jQuery or I recognize this JavaScript. I don't have to, if I want documentation and help on how to use this, I can just go straight to Stack Overflow instead of having to look for specific Moodle documentation. The same with Bootstrap, if I want documentation on, I just know how it works as soon as I open it. So for young people, new developers coming in, especially at a university level where quite often we would have interns who would come in and they'd have a week to work on Moodle and just making sure that straight away they hit the ground and they're running. I think it's going to be great for the Moodle community and getting new blood into the Moodle community and new younger people interested in it. Yeah, I agree. Thanks, Stuart. I should add this is kind of part of a longer-term work. Obviously, it will continue. There is this small project now and then there's, you may have noticed we've actually hired a UX developer, a UX designer full-time who's going to be doing a lot of user research. So long-term, he'll be coordinating efforts in that area as well. Who's the new UX person of mine? His name is Daniel. He just... His surname... What's his surname again? We've just been interviewing and we had a couple at the end and it got a bit very close. Okay, cool. Well, it suggests you properly when he starts. He doesn't start for a couple of weeks. Brilliant. Okay. But he has a lot of experience with some pretty large sites in Australia and mobile apps. Quite complicated ones. Daniel Jimenez with a J. Daniel Jimenez, that's right. J. Okay, well, I'll go on. I guess you might as well go through this in order. I'll hand over to you, Damien, maybe you want to start off talking about the CSS framework and there's obviously a summary there in the document, but anything else or maybe anyone wants to chime in on thoughts there. I think it's a contentious issue. Sure. So, obviously, we have a number of options with what CSS framework we choose. The reason we want to change the framework is because Bootstrap 2 is no longer supported upstream and we want to go with something that's going to be supported for a long time. The most obvious choices are Bootstrap 3 or Bootstrap 4. And I think that's definitely the right choice because it's a smaller step from the theme that we currently have. It's not another new thing that people need to learn and it's going to be mostly compatible with the things that we already have. It's also... They're also one of the most popular and Martin's talked a few times about the choice between Nui and jQuery and at the time they were both equal, and now jQuery is by far a million times more popular and that's what everybody knows and that's the shift we want to be on. So, I talked about this at the US Moot and got some feedback and I've also posted about it and been looking at the feedback. I've also gone through the status of where the bootstrap... different bootstrap versions are. Currently, Bootstrap 4 is at Alpha 2. They've got 5% of the issues left to close before they release in Alpha 3 and then there's going to be one more Alpha before they release the final version. That final Alpha, they've only got 30 issues in the queue for them to fix and to me it's looking like that's already stable enough. These additional fixes that they're going to add aren't going to change compatibility with what we do and we're probably worse gambling on going with Bootstrap 4 which will either be released or soon to be released by the time we release 3.2 and that will sort of give us the longest lifetime for this theme and it will have all the latest features that people are looking for. One implication of the CSS framework that we choose, it means that this new theme will support less browsers than the old theme. So we're going to have to drop some support for IE 9 and I think IE 10. Okay. Does anybody here feel that Bootstrap 4 is going to be the new Yui? Is Bootstrap on the way out? Is it dying? Some people said that and I don't really know but is anybody here in that camp that they think it's time to look at a new framework or is Bootstrap still good enough and still the most sensible choice? Okay. Everyone's got strong feelings? Okay. I know you've done a lot of research around this. Damien, I'm not going against that. I just wondered if anybody here had those feelings because I remember very well that Yui jQuery choice and at the time there was quite a consensus around Yui. Martin, are you looking at the Zoom group chat because Chris and Stuart have commented. No, I'm not. Sorry. I definitely want to hear opinions from everybody. Great. Sorry, thanks for the chat. We have big companies behind Bootstrap so we'll see it. Yeah, I think it's a big company. That's true. That's a good point. Okay. Well, keep on going, Damien. I haven't actually personally even looked at the second one at all. Okay. So the second one is just that we write all of our BHAT tests and we assume that the theme is clean. So as part of this, we're still going to be shipping clean. We're going to need a way to test all of our BHAT features on clean and whatever the new theme is called. And this also impacts, like, there were some comments about SNAP chips with its own BHAT tests and I'd also like to be able to run the full suite using SNAP as the default theme. So this is just about extending BHAT so that you can specify the theme when you do a run and be able to test on all themes. So Raj has already started looking at that and he understands the problem pretty well. So he's going to be going ahead with that. Can I ask how big a job that is? With SNAP, we had issues with this. But it did seem that you could get pretty close to a theme agnostic solution just by removing some theme-specific CSS from some of the tests and by rewriting some of the steps to do a more theme agnostic thing. So currently it opens a menu and then logs out using the logout item in the logout menu and uses some highly specific CSS to make sure that it's hitting the right link. But it could have just went to kind of slash logout or it could have used less specific CSS so that it works on any logout menu and I'm just wondering if that's an easy of a fix. When we're relying on very specific CSS that's something that we should be fixing in our B-Head files anyway because they should be more like English and less like programs. If we have to rely on very specific CSS we should be converting that into a custom step in the B-Head. And the other part of it is allowing the theme to override any custom step from core. So if you have a different, your logout link is in a different location then you override the logout step to describe how to get to your logout link and then that should, it's not a big change I don't think. As long as it's not a big change if it's a project that's big enough to keep people busy for the next six months then obviously that's going to take away from other work that needs to be done. Yeah I don't think it is and I think Raj will be able to handle it on his own. Anybody got any other questions about that? I guess that's pretty self-explanatory now. Just trying on the chat or voice, it's all good. So the next one about the navigation is obviously some years ago we made the decision to centralize all the navigation into the one navigation block and a lot of things that were spread around the page were all brought together into one place. It's obviously something everyone is used to but it doesn't work very well on a mobile small screen, touch screen. It has this weird tree problem where the little triangles sometimes do one thing and sometimes another and the things fold out or don't fold out. It's very connected with the nav bar along the top because it's one structure. Yes, I realize the word intuitive is very contentious means different things to different people but I don't know, personally I hear a lot of vague complaints about the navigation block and I hear a lot of people saying they switch it off completely and I know a lot of themes do that and a lot of sites do that so it's not working clearly and then when you look at across all the dot com sites in the world and all the services and things, there is a very definite trend to them they're converging on a design which for lack of a better word I'll sort of call the mobile touch screen of design where you have a fold out menu on the left that is relatively flat just a list of links and it may be 10 or 12 maybe and that's it, there's no hierarchy links, there's no complexity there it's just showing you what you need it pops out on the left and you can put it away so it has usually a hamburger or something on the top to get rid of that I think had this eye looking at it I think it's possible to create that from the current navigation tree structure that we have it needs exploring but I think it's possible to have a menu on the side of any particular page you're looking at that shows you the links you need in that context plus some links that take you to other places which will reload the page to go there it does mean a few more page loads but it's a lot more touch friendly and a lot easier to discover I think so that's the basic idea of this one that's going to need a lot of testing I think there's probably a way to do it mostly programmatically so if you're in a forum for example all the things that are in the forum settings turning subscriptions on and off that kind of stuff for a teacher that's what they would see there and then you'd have links off to your dashboard to maybe your grades page whatever the most key things are that we always want to show could go in there so that's not all being worked out and that issue would be the place to discuss that any thoughts on that general idea realising that it's not not at all worked out yet I think when you touched upon things that used to be outside of the navigation block that were just in the page and got moved into the navigation block I think that's a really important thing to consider because before we even start looking at how we should kind of like replicate the function of the navigation block elsewhere maybe a good step would be to say what things can come out of the navigation block can go back onto the page because once you've done that and you've stripped the navigation block back a bit starting to think about how you want to navigate around the page will become easier because there's less things that you need to think about then I also completely agree with you and you said more page clicks and a smaller menu it's better to have more page loads I guess than a ridiculously complicated menu that tries to make it possible for you to navigate to anywhere within Moodle just for the sake of not having to move through the pages I think having simplified navigation is way more important one of those things that disappeared the navigation was next and previous in activities which I was against at the time I thought that was a really good thing to keep everyone voted against me on that one and it kind of everyone said oh you can just use the navigation now and it died but I've noticed the trend of most things putting next and previous is back in and to me it makes so much sense to have that I would like to see that for one thing for the themes that have been demonstrated recently at the US Mood and at the French Mood and some of the other themes that I've seen they have a very specific use case for that next and previous if you notice I've never used resources outside of an activity because if you clicked next and your next thing on the page was a PDF the behaviour would be kind of inappropriate for that next and previous so they have very specific constraints that enable them to use that next and previous navigation within activities however looking at the majority of the sites that I've seen it's not the case that there are no resources it is the case that there are lots of resources and therefore next and previous does not necessarily make sense for those users and for those institutions it was implemented as originally as a kind of a theme element that you could call and stick into the theme so the theme could choose but maybe it's something that could be decided on a course setting and also maybe an activity setting maybe each activity could have a flag you know a common flag that turned that on and off per activity perhaps just thinking to allow it to be flexible and also to not require plugin developers to do any work I think the way that plugin developers are doing the work on it is very specific to their institutions and it might not necessarily be a use case that's useful for the majority of middle users that's my only thought really okay so I guess the key thing I'm getting out of that is that it should be optional if it's implemented so we'll make sure of that that's just one little thing but I think what I was saying before was was exactly right if we can get some of the things out of the navigation then it will simplify anyway that issue is where we can talk about that anyone wants to say some more now can I add something focusing on what we can remove might be more important than thinking about new things to add at this point yeah for sure I was going to say that I agree with that we have to remove things from navigation that's something I've been saying also for years but the problem is that developers don't know where to put the links in the navigation in order to solve the problem of moving them out of the navigation we have to offer developers a framework to actually place these things in the content in the right places that then we'll also add consistency throughout the different modules which completely implement things differently with buttons to add things at the top, others at the bottom nothing really consistent because I mean I found myself adding things to the navigation just because I didn't know and I think we have to solve that yeah now you're exactly right I mean as soon as we take things out of navigation it will impact all things because they'll have to put that stuff somewhere so it will be it'll be quite a big one that affects a lot of things rather than just this one thing so anyway we can discuss it in this issue some more but I think it's going to be a tricky balance but I think it's definitely worth pursuing the next one here is an idea that it's sort of part of that actually one of the things that could be taken out of navigation is the ability to jump all the way across across the hierarchy so between sections or between courses that is something that could be put elsewhere one idea was to put it as a drop down menu in the nav bar the nav bars you know most themes have the nav bar and so it wouldn't really affect any layout of any existing themes it's just that when you click on the current course name it becomes a menu that jumps you to your other courses and so that seems to be a quick win yes the nav bar is the breadcrumb sorry? I was just referring to Stuart the nav bar that you referred to is actually what everyone else refers to as the breadcrumb in general yeah be sure I know everyone calls it a breadcrumb technically it is not a breadcrumb but okay it's the nav bar in code just look like a breadcrumb a breadcrumb is when you run along like Hansel and Gretel and drop you have breadcrumbs showing the path you took to get there whereas this doesn't do that it actually shows you where you are in the hierarchy that's a technique we can call it a breadcrumb when we get rid of navigation blocks this will be a breadcrumb this will be exactly the path that you took to get on this page it will be the path from the word of the site which is different a breadcrumb is your back button on your browser that's a breadcrumb anyway so yeah I mean that says has anyone else done it that way I don't know I've never really seen that much Fred did it three years ago yeah and I did it because of a demo of jewel that I had seen I didn't come up with it I think there's an issue with it because to me it doesn't look like an established UI pattern I've not seen I can't think of any website or even desktop software where they have something that looks like that and operates in that way and I have a concern with mutating the existing UI pattern because it's established in Moodle it's been there from as long as I've ever used Moodle myself and I think to actually mutate it and change the behavior of it in such a significant way could have some problems for people that's my opinion on it I also looking at it and trying to think at how it might work on a mobile touch device I think if you've got like a lot of courses or a lot of sections it could be pretty difficult to actually use your fingers to navigate through the dropdowns and if you've got a small viewport with some of the organizations I've seen we've got ridiculous numbers of courses in a category or crazy numbers of sections I would imagine that the dropdown could quite easily slip outside of the viewport sorry to be critical I'd rather be honest about I'm on the fence about it I kind of like the idea but I agree it's a bit of a Frankenstein thing I mean is it the alternative is you keep it as it is and you have to jump up once and then maybe you see a menu on that location somewhere and then you jump down again I prefer that personally and other things as well to consider is it better to navigate through sections in a different way so instead of having a huge list of sections somewhere on the top of the page next and previous on sections so possibly considering one section at a time I'm not saying that's a definite solution to everybody's kind of requirements but it's something that should be considered as well as getting things out as the breadcrum hybrid menu solution and kind of like saying can we just put the navigator elsewhere on the page we just have to balance what we can do in one theme versus what we can implement that's going to not break everyone's themes so you guys did a bunch of user testing didn't you quite recently I think I've sat in on two different sessions now the Moodle Minnesota guys yeah cool we did very similar but as I said and let me just dig it up because I dug these out beforehand we asked the students how useful they found it to be able to view all the categories so we asked the teachers and the students how useful they found it to do all the categories on the course site whether it was and there were five options rated from yes it's essential to no and the thing that we found was that students really didn't want to see that list of categories and were totally not interested in it but the teachers they had a system of setup so they could see the categories they needed in fact they weren't even interested what categories courses were in and the system was set up so they had access to those quickly and that kind of meant that we deliberately made a choice that you didn't need to provide a mechanism for very quick access to categories for either with the majority of your users and for admins we made it possible and easy for them but just kind of focusing on the fact that you might not need to be able to see all those categories as the primary users for your system were probably not that sounds really reasonable but I think jumping between your own courses is something people do need to do totally between your own courses the primary functionality of the entire LMS that's right the very first menu you would probably build would be how do I access my courses and focus completely on that and the other stuff can come later things like accessing blogs, notes what else badges all those things immediately can come completely separately from that but the primary functionality of the entire LMS should be based on the fact that people need to navigate to the courses and everything else can pretty much disappear if you've got that right I totally agree that's why this point is in this list it's about jumping between courses quickly where do we put that in the interface in a way that doesn't break all themes and doesn't rely on custom menus doesn't rely on whether you have blocks or not that's where that goes so that's what this issue is really about one idea is putting it in because that's usually on the page but if we've got a better idea that's the place to put it looking at the both the new Canvas interface Future Learn even the new BB Ultra interface which Nathan can probably tell you more about looking at Khan Academy I can certainly just and again the two separate themes we did at Sussex building a page that shows to the students all the courses are enrolled in and it's a page and you can always get to it by going my courses and here's a page showing all my courses and all the things I need to do on it I know the dashboard is is that meant to be the dashboard I know that the other middle meets when we talked about dashboard we've never really focused on that how do you customize it what blocks would be useful to add to it etc yeah I think I agree the dashboard is a key it's the hub with the spokes but there's a separate project about dashboard the Moodle Users Association had a requirements it's one of their lists one of the short lists they're voting on right now so that here in fact there was a presentation yesterday I streamed it actually from Leap and they have a dashboard and it looks like all the other dashboards everyone else wants as well which is basically something that has your courses in the center you see all your courses and you see the progress in each course and you get the notifications in a timely way from each of those as well those are the key things that will happen anyway separately I guess maybe that may be enough so maybe we just focus on taking people back to that or maybe a special page that just shows your courses if we have to in the meantime so these are not disconnected for the tutor and for the student if we are deciding if whoever is deciding decides that the dashboard will be the primary navigation element for users within Moodle to be able to access their courses then this intuitive navigation from course to course becomes make the dashboard do this yeah yep okay good well there's an issue we're going to work on in there the this is about getting rid of blocks the next one at least hiding blocks so we need to settle on one way in this theme to basically deprecate blocks still supporting them still making them you can get to them but not having them in your face all the time because I think a lot of people have shown it's not necessary I think a lot of people have abused blocks because it's a pretty easy way to get your stuff onto the Moodle page in a variety of places some of those blocks could easily be done in other ways as reports as activities as many other plugin types and some of them are just very questionable you do not need to see your calendar on every page if you want to go look at your calendar there should be an easy way to jump to the calendar you see it full screen or it's just integrated in your device calendar so you never really need to look at it in Moodle anyway so there's kind of solutions for all those blocks I think but yeah so one idea here is to move all the block regions somewhere just for backward compatibility and I guess people that are encouraged to not add blocks to courses unless they really really need them any thoughts on that about blocks in general any experiences actually with removing blocks have people missed them as it seems to be like a bit of a bandaid to pull off this is Nathan here it's a good to introduce yourself thanks Nathan because he's speaking so I'll start my video as well so I work with the Moodle rooms guys quite a bit I think so one of the things specifically with SNAP is around obviously we do something different with the blocks in SNAP and I think there's general understanding about why we do that however this will be controversial when we start talking to Moodle users purely because I think just about every conversation I've ever had with a customer about using SNAP is they love what they're seeing and they love all the design thinking behind it and then they want to put blocks back on the left and right hand side I think we have to recognize that this is going to be controversial with some members of the community as well so It's a shame Paolo isn't here because he did a very nice thing with Moodle a long time ago where he wanted to put blocks in as parts of the main content so he just swapped made them be able to put in the same you can put resources and activities in on your page I really liked that as a concept I want to just highlight that if people really really want to use lots of blocks left and right or whatever they can switch to a different theme they go back to clean or they use essential or whatever they're currently using that shouldn't be broken but this is as a default theme it's kind of we're just trying to nudge people down this road of thinking about cleaner simpler touch friendly designs where students can focus on the content so it still needs to have block access somewhere so I mean we've got any ideas for how to or any examples actually of a theme that has kept blocks but just deprecated them visually there's the Sussex one where blocks always appear at the furter in the course so as a tutor underneath your content on every single page you have the two regions and one is what was it visible to students and the other one is only visible to teachers and admin and I think I can't remember what theme I saw the other day that had pretty much exactly the same concept that was one pattern sorry I don't have I could get a piece of paper and draw it would that be useful? Yeah later this was just a chat but if you think of it putting them in this issue would be good or on the forum anyone else got any other ideas of I mean they could be it could be sort of a hamburger type thing that pops them out somewhere or maybe off the other side a hamburger is generally associated with navigation isn't it so you click on a hamburger when you want to move somewhere else within the site yep it's a thought putting blocks in a hamburger would not fit that pattern that is used to on the internet yeah I agree it's not directly related to the user interface aspects of this but somebody did a few years ago do some performance tests where they tested different themes in Moodle in various different settings and one of the few things they found that made a major noticeable difference to Moodle performance was turning blocks off and I think that's particularly important because most blocks are added by default relatively few that people actually choose and ask for whereas they get a bunch of them and I think their primary usage is padding Moodle would be too wide without them so they have these things on the side but they're making better base calls they're taking up time it's very true it just visually balances the page as part of this I would like in the default installation to not have any blocks so hopefully it will look good with this new theme it will still look balanced I don't have an example but I did build a theme a while ago which worked with the idea that Bass has been talking about in the chat there which is like you said Martin to have it off canvas and slide in now Stuart makes a very good point about the hamburger button and it's context between different websites on the internet so probably a different icon would be useful to use for that but it does work the thing I find was that I needed to collapse each block initially so that then once you open what's essentially a drawer menu you can then expand the blocks that you need which encouraged users I think to put in less blocks which is a big thing I think initially someone mentioned that in the chat there Moodle puts in a lot of blocks by default which not every user needs yeah so I think reducing that could do a lot as well okay yeah right okay so that's something we'll work on the next thing is just about style I guess what are people's thoughts about I mean this is a complex issue but I'm not saying oh it's going to be material design or anything with a name necessarily but I mean what are people's thoughts for a default theme it would be nice and I guess the effect I want is when someone installs Moodle out of the box they go wow Moodle has changed a lot right and we know it hasn't because it's just that skin and it's a few colors and choices of white space and layout but has anyone got any good thoughts for what that could be or a guiding principle or you know any anything about that it's worth remembering that there's some bits of Moodle even today they're very easy to change and kind of a very big visual impact and then there's other bits that are incredibly hard to change and probably have much less of an impact but still you know lots of small impacts add up together I'm quite interested in fixing that long tail and making it so that you can change the look of a button with one line of CSS and it affects every single button across the Moodle but that's long, arduous, boring work whereas changing the front page of Moodle so the header looks cool and has a cool image and using a nice open source font from Google Fonts that's relatively easy to do and people are already doing it today with the tools and abilities that are available in Moodle and I would say for that initial newness then probably people will end up doing the easy stuff because it's easy and that's good and that's cool but I would like to remind people that we've got boring work that needs done to make all the models look the same and all the buttons look the same and forms to have buttons in the same place while looking at ad work Totally agree I think a lot of this is probably governed also by Bootstrap 4 perhaps and I guess following those guidelines and fixing up all those little areas absolutely in this project I hope we can do a lot of that as we go a lot of little things obviously not everything but it would be something to help that overall look I see a lot of people saying material is a good choice material Bootstrap exists so this should be interesting that's something we can already start experimenting with John Oakley already had a shot at a very interesting design which we can probably post later we're getting on in time a bit What David said about the elements that make up Moodle just referring back to that if you actually think about either the front page of your Moodle or once you get into a course listing page those are the elements that are on Moodle an element that lists possibly all the courses that you have access to it doesn't really matter what the stuff around it is up to the institution but if there was any way to actually concentrate on making the bits that the institution put into their framework a little bit nicer that would be great I know that a few of us have had some fun on Twitter talking about things like when a university wants to improve the quality of their teaching and learning the first thing they do is put a carousel on the front page and that has a zero to do with teaching and learning and it's easy to do Moodle, it's a very quick kind of plaster and a bandage but the actual components that make up Moodle are the things that make it look dated it's not the stuff that appears over the top it is the underlying things about you open an activity and you've got kind of 23 tabs across the top with 16 buttons and two search form elements somewhere over here and then maybe somewhere else down the page some other bits of stuff there's a lot to do activities is another whole if you look at my priorities stuff in my keynotes these days going overhauling activities is very very high on our list and then we've got all this technical debt still remaining with moustache those templates getting that finished looking at the core and fundamental pages that people visit the most in Moodle I think you're going to take it in about the profile page Martin we talked today about the dashboard page with those items concentrate the dashboard page the fact that it displays the list of courses that every user is going to need every single day every time they access Moodle make that look beautiful make that look wonderful and you've straight away got a huge distinction from anything else you're like this is Moodle it looks great it does the job yeah all on the list for sure yeah we've been looking if you haven't looked at it yet in the MUA they have a look at their proposal for the dashboard and you can comment there if you'd like to see what you think about that but a lot of people are behind that with the dashboard but that's not we haven't got room for that in this particular cycle so that would be probably 3.3 the solution though for that make Moodle look distinct from older versions is make the components that make up the fundamental core of what Moodle is brilliant for users to interact with and visually stunning it's not just a visual change the dashboard is going to need a lot of work done around completion to make the progress bars look and be correct we are working on notifications and things right now so that is something anyway we're getting a bit off track so let's go through these it's a very important thing just not part of this particular theme just one note on that like this theme and UX go together but they're not the same thing and if we're going to try to improve UX through the theme we have to consider UX as a global thing because if we work on that theme now we improve the course navigation etc we have to make that consistent with the rest of Moodle because we didn't consider that combination with the changes we made before we're going to have other UX issues I'm not saying that we have to change the dashboard but we probably have to overlook the overall in order to design something that works and that will evolve properly with the rest of the changes we make if you use the journeys you can map out isn't there so this is kind of about navigation if you map out just draw a little mobile screens and go this is how I get to my course here's my front page of Moodle this is how I get to my courses this is how I access this and you set out each of the tasks and put it in the right place on the right page so that when you think about designing each of those pages, the dashboard the profile page you know that these are the components we've got to primarily, we've got to prioritize on that page, these are the things we need to really think about on that page and not get bogged down in too much of the other detail and extendable bits and then you'll have your user journey mapped out in your little screens of how people flow through and that perhaps will impact on whether or not you need these drop downs from the bread crumb because you've already got a place you know that this is where we're going to do this I think did the lips show that work to you Martin that they'd done on that who sorry did the French UX guy's partner show that to you in the French Moodle Meet at all the dashboard they didn't actually show a lot of that was still quite early work they hadn't actually had working courses with it yet so I said let's please show it when you actually got a course in it before the dashboard though that they will have mapped out the user journeys and I've certainly seen their documents on it before about where about everything clips yeah yeah yes thanks this is overall UX work we have to be careful with this because we're not designing one site or one you know we have to look at what we can do without for this project breaking everybody's sites so we're a bit limited with this particular thing I just want to keep on track here with time because we could obviously I would love to talk about this for hours but we are trying to conscious of everyone's presence here the next thing on the list is this idea of settings and this came up in a lot of the usability studies that were done at the thing is whenever I watch people trying to figure out how to change a page they find it so hard to find that little tiny edit settings link buried in navigation and it's never it's not consistent sometimes we've got turn editing on buttons and sometimes we've got this little link that little link can move around on different pages so there's an idea here just to have a gear icon or something like that on the top right of every page that basically goes to editing for that page all those in favour is that an idea I think it's a really good idea and it wouldn't break themes I don't think and we just how we do it on all activities is still I think unsolved but is probably something we can do all settings that goes along with what I said I find that it goes along with what I said earlier about providing a framework for activities to implement things in a fashion that consistence throughout Google like activity has a cog appearing there I don't need to know where it is it's going to be there anyway for example so David is saying what settings and I'm saying like if you're on a forum you're looking at a forum and you are a teacher then the settings for the forum there would be a cog on the top of the page that just takes you to the existing mod edit page if you're on the course there's a cog that just takes you to the course settings page if you're on the on your own profile looking at your profile the cog takes you to the edit profile page so it's not rocket science there's no need for any underlying changes it's purely just making that link very visible I agree with you Fred that the whole settings infrastructure could probably use a lot of looking at and I think that's a future thing but in the short term this could be done in this theme and probably have a very large effect yeah I think this would be great for editors and tutors I think it would make their life a lot easier just to always have a quick link to the settings page for the particular thing you're looking at yeah that's the idea of that one you were mentioning the difference between editing the pages and adding blocks and then going to the same page that cog is not going to solve that it's just going to be a more prominent link to the settings of the activity you're in customizing the page adding blocks is still going to be the same thing our profiles are going to be the same you're going to have editing my profile and adding blocks to my profile now something like blocks if there is a slide out region that's where you have your button to add blocks you wouldn't need it on the main content anymore right so the editing would just be reflecting exactly what you're looking at at any given time that's basically the idea so I think there's a solution through there yeah the last thing is just this requirement to not break existing themes as much as we can and not break plugins allow people to switch back to clean or more or any other theme and it shouldn't be affected so that's just as I said at the beginning kind of a limiting parameter for this development anyway more serious UX work with our UX person hopefully involving everybody will be ongoing and we will have to at some point break things but let's do that very deliberately and very carefully and very successfully so that everyone agrees it was a good idea and we have a campaign to plugins update their themes version 3.3 or 3.4 or whatever it is so we step into that new era maybe we'll call it moodle 4 who knows yeah that's it I think it's pretty clear so that's sort of the list of things on the plate if you want to get involved in any of those things you want to post supporting information or countering information you know those tracker issues are the place to be let's talk in the forums let's even meet again you know let's see how it goes but thanks for everyone for coming along and it's been really useful I've taken some notes and hopefully we can really make something happen here I'm very encouraged actually about all the things that are happening on moodle and I want to thank everyone here for working on it I was just at ISTE 16,000 teachers in Denver probably 500 companies and a lot of little LMSs and you know I'm looking at them all and they look sweet but functionality wise I think they don't hold a candle to moodle and I think some of the impression of moodle and you know moodle will be the best option around so anyway thanks everybody I'll publish a recording of this somewhere I have to do some processing I'll do that next couple of days and I'll be heading home to Perth thanks everyone thanks everyone cheers good night