The Fluid Project
- Colin Clark
The Fluid Project
The Fluid Project is an open, collaborative project to improve the user experience of community source software. FLUID includes members of the uPortal, Sakai, and Moodle communities who are working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, and more within academic software projects. The Fluid Project website is at http://fluidproject.org.
Goals of the Fluid Project
Our goal is to help improve the user experience of community source web applications including Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student and Moodle. Fluid will combine both design and technology to create a living library of sharable user interface components that can be reused across community source projects. These components will be built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of usability, accessibility, internationalization, and security. The Fluid framework will enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse personal and institutional needs found within community source. We will integrate these rich, client-side UI components and the framework to support them into existing presentation technologies used in Sakai and uPortal.
In order to encourage user-centered design within community source software, Fluid will also create a designer's toolkit that will offer useful design, accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation. This toolkit will include the results of several heuristic analyses and usability studies, a collection of design models such as user profiles and personas, and a growing library of UI design patterns. Members of the Fluid team will be available to provide usability and accessibility support within the Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student, and Moodle communities.
How will Fluid Help uPortal?
Our goal is to improve the user experience of uPortal and other community source software projects. The FLUID team is closely involved in the uPortal community, and will continue to ensure that our priorities and deliverables are consistent with the needs of the community. We will contribute all of our design and technical work to the uPortal community under the ECL and Creative Commons licenses. This will include:
- A collection of well-designed, accessible, and reusable UI components
- Integration of the Fluid framework and components into portlets and uPortal 3
- New usability and heuristic studies of uPortal
- Ongoing user research and synthesis of usability data in uPortal
- A library of user interface design patterns
- A compilation of user research documentation such as personas, profiles, scenarios, and other design models for uPortal
- Increased involvement and input from skilled designers, accessibility experts, and UI developers