Thank you Rafael to bring this discussion in the community.

Next september we are going to initiate usability tests with dotlrn within communities of practice and e-learning program for a group of people in the corporate sector. We have similar programs running with other groups and not rare we are facing the necessity to develop easier interfaces to make dotlrn accessible to a growing diversity of users.

I think you pointed a great weakness in dotlrn interface. Our experience have been showing us that tab structure really create a false sense to users and frequently people feel very discomfortable with their experience with this structure. People claims too there are links that could be immediatly acessible from tab structure instead buried in the interface.

I tried Selva-theme today in a test installation and i think it represents a good approach to improve the quality of dotLRN associated to usability issues. I made some screeshots and uploaded them to http://www.teknedigital.com.br/screenshots/ . I did little modifications to Jeremys' code to get header_logo change working and putting Selva Theme as a option for portal template layout. The idea about submenu structure is really interesting and will be a great enhancing to dotlrn interface when fully implemented.

Our approach to usability tests will follow heuristic evaluation methodology developed by Nielsen and modified for an evaluation of e-learning programs by Reeves et all (see for example http://dl.aace.org/10405).
We are not totally committed with this approach yet but we have a number of papers published here in Brazil using Reeves' approach and some of them could be used in our work. I really appreciate if you could put available documentation developed by Dorian and others.

Thank you.

\Orzenil

Hi again,

I looked at different ways of implementing a kind of "static" menu for the tabs.

The goal is what is what is described in the post of Rafael : having a tabbed static menu (My Space, Courses, Preferences) that should qute never change (we are thinking if we should write the name of the community we're in, in case we're in one for example), and the menu that is now in the tabs (so the portal pages and control panel links) would move to the submenu.

In this view people would always have a reference and a contextual menu.

Now here are a few tries I made and the problems I had. Maybe you can help me find the good solution to solve them ?

-> I tried a few static links (written by hand in the adp). My problem is that portlets should be in a page, and to be referenced a page should be in a portal. So I tried to create a virtual portal with only the static pages. The problem is I don't how to reach these pages ?
-> I then tried to insert my pages in the default portal (My dotLRN workspace), but the fact is that in this case the page also appears in the contextual submenu of "My Workspace" (this is how I called the link to /dotlrn/index in the static menu, to make the difference with "My Space" page)

So the only thing I'm thinking about now is to do the last solution, and add conditionnals in the TCL procs to say "that's the page I use on top so I don't put in the submenu", but that's dreadful, isn't it ?

Hope you can help me make the right choice !

Jeremy