This project focused on improving the overall usability for project management portal software, DrProject, especially targeting a redesign of the web administration interface.

Along with mentors Paula Bach & Greg Wilson, Liz Blankenship, a student of Science in Information at the University of Michigan (USA), did a redesign of the web-based administration interface for DrProject. She documented her activites in her blog.

Read on for Liz’s project report that gives a brief overview of her efforts:

Project background

DrProject is an open source project management portal designed with a target audience of beginning programming students in a classroom setting. This project was primarily a combined effort of Liz Blankenship as a participant in Season of Usability, and Qiyu Zhu as a participant in Google Summer of Code.

Thanks also to my mentors, Paula Bach and Greg Wilson, and the development community.

Project Goals

Professors often act as administrators of DrProject portals by using a web-based administrative portal that has a number of shortcomings. Some of the problem areas we targeted include:

• streamlining the process for adding new students at the beginning of each semester
• preventing self-registered users from joining the site without joining any projects
• restructuring the web-administration and refocusing the content to be more intuitive and relevant to users

We also created a web-based role editor.

In addition to working with Qiyu to redesign the administrative interface, I faced some additional usability challenges on my own:

• redesigning the current site-wide announcements and communication
• analyzing the information architecture
• assessing the accessibility of DrProject (more)
• designing simpler issue tracking that would be more appealing to students (see below)

Process

Throughout the summer, mockups and click-through prototypes based on careful reflection, user feedback, and cognitive walkthroughs were my main approach to redesigning the interface. I often had to work with the developers to understand technical constraints and revise my designs based upon this information. I also did user testing with both the existing interface and some of my prototypes.

I frequently looked at other project management software for ideas about creating a more usable design. When I decided to assess the information architecture, I sorted cards to determine natural groupings outside of the constraints of the existing interface.

Featured Mockups and Screens

Above: A dashboard interface for communicating site-wide announcements and generally linking to convenient pages upon login

Above: A simpler interface for issues management for students, more like a to do list

Above: Qiyu and I created this role manager. Previously, roles could only be managed by command line.

This project was mentored by: