Sakai Interface Redesign
Spring 2016-Sakai Community
The Sakai Learning Management System (LMS) was created in 2005. After multiple major releases over the course of the subsequent decade, in 2016 Kyle and the Academic Applications team worked to overhaul, simplify, and modernize the system’s user interface. After releasing a version of the improved Sakai interface locally at NYU, the team worked closely with the global Sakai community to release the redesigned UI as part of 2016’s Sakai 11 release, which would subsequently be adopted by hundreds of academic institutions and millions of learners across the world.
Overview/promotional video for the Sakai 11 release, produced by Kyle
Kyle and team worked closely with open-source community members from across the world, coming to agreement on styling, naming conventions, portal features, and branding for Sakai 11. The team created usability testing protocols, which they conducted locally at NYU; they also collaborated with other institutions, who used the same protocols to conduct testing of their own to arrive at a more representational data set that could inform the UX decisions for this release.
In June 2016, Sakai 11 was released, and the improvements to overall UX were dramatic.
The Sakai 11 redesign also included a number of new and innovative features designed by Kyle and the Academic Applications team.
"Sites" Menu & Favoriting
Kyle and team included a site navigation modal, which organizes course sites by term. Sites can be "starred" (i.e., favorited) to show up in the top menu bar.
New Gradebook
The release of the New Gradebook in Sakai 11 marked the culmination of over a year's work to completely redesign the front-end user experience for grading in Sakai. The existing Gradebook tool had long been a pain point for users; the New Gradebook provided familiar spreadsheet-style grade entry and a clean UX.