Background

The admin backend is a major part of a web framework like OpenACS. As Philip Greenspun once noted, roughly half of all the pages in a dynamic website are more or less admin pages. Making administrating a system a pleasure is vital for any system, including OpenACS.

37signals published a book called Defensive Design for the Web last spring. The book was lately selected as the best web design book of 2004. Defensive Design for the Web is about improving the contingency design of a website, including e.g. error messages, help and forms. The book also provides a heuristics to analyze the contingency level of a service.

The Proposal

I will go through all the major OpenACS components, including core and .LRN, and analyze their contingency design level with the help of heuristics developed by 37signals. As a result of this analysis, I will improve the administrative and end-user visible interfaces to the point where they will score at least 80% of the applicable parts of the test.

The deliverable

A system that is slicker and more pleasurable to use out-of-the-box. The UI of OpenACS has gotten a lot better lately, but has still room for improvement.

Concrete improvements include e.g.:

• Real double-click protection. Adding functions to ad_form that disable buttons when one is clicked and give a visual clue that the process has started. Current double-click protection protects from duplicate entries but results often in user-visible errors.
• Improved error pages.
• Improved “inter-page” notification/error message delivery and display system.

Tampere, January 6th 2005,
Jarkko Laine