There are quite a lot of settings available to administrators in Moodle LMS. Some settings may not be in the best places/categories for organic discovery etc.

We should investigate the overall architecture of the admin related menus. Determine what can be done to improve the experience for Admins. Implement any changes.

The initial phases of this work will be research based with LMS Administrators to identity initial pain points.

Phase 1 - Complete

Objective:

Understand the steps of the current workflow for both new and existing Moodle admins, including the processes for initial setup and maintenance, and challenges that they face along the way. These insights will be used as guide towards helping the team ideate and design an improved experience for the administrator role.

Recap:

The first round of research provided us with insights of the recurring issues around navigation, the need to distinguish teaching/learning from infrastructure settings, as well as early indicators of some common configuration settings that users prioritise for the setup of their LMS site. The px team will need to explore these initial insights further to see how they can help to improve the organizational structure of the admin site settings page.

Phase 2 - Complete

Objectives

• Validate whether there’s a difference between how “System/Dev Admins”(technical users) and “Application Admins” (learning designers) use Admin settings

• Determine high-level settings categories based on user mental models and ways of working

Recap:

The second round of research helped validate that there is a difference between settings that affect teaching/learning and those that affect the backend/server, but they're currently not organized in a way that clearly shows that distinction. The general and plugin tabs, for example, house the largest amount of settings, however the majority of them are not considered to be categorized as such and should either have their own tab or be placed into a more relevant category.

Phase 3 - Complete

Objectives:

• Re-organize the settings that live within general and plugin tabs into tabs with related settings and/or new categories

Summary:

The phase 3 objective is to reorganize settings from the general and plugin tabs into related tabs and categories. Research questions include whether some settings need their own category, which settings are 'general,' and if the general tab is still needed. The hypothesis is that the general tab can be eliminated by categorizing those settings elsewhere, and that messaging/notifications and backend plugins should have their own categories.

The intended impact is that redistributing settings will create a more intuitive experience where settings are easier to find.

Recommendations

1. The suggested structure(s) including tab name changes and new categories will be shared with our content designer for review and design. Clarity and guidance is also needed on the following topics:

• What’s the logic with the design? What’s the rule for how we name things, for how we name headings?

• What’s the style guide? how do we handle lists, the links tree? we seem to use the same name for things that are different, etc. 

• How does alphabetising work in a language like Mandarin? Is there a better, more functional way to list things, vs. alphabetically?

2. Search is crucial to the structure and needs to be prioritized in upcoming sprints if we move forward with these organizational changes. It needs to produce relevant results at a much faster pace.

3. Test the new concepts externally with the Moodle community to gather feedback on the proposed organizational changes to site administration. The invitation to test and provide feedback can be shared with the community via Moodle forums as well as having out customer success team share with their Moodle LMS clients.

Next Steps

The immediate next step will to be improve the search functionality for admin settings. This will improve the overall experience for admin settings while other outcomes are further explored. Also improving search won't "block" or end up being wasted effort as other efforts to improve admin settings are explored.