FST Graduate Research Topic

Research Topic: Make the Landing more usable
Suggested By: Jon Dron
Last Update: May 16th, 2025

Overview Athabasca Landing, a general purpose social media system used by AU, has many benefits, but many people are put off by its complexities and inconsistencies. The purpose of this research is to find ways to improve that, including implementation as an Elgg theme. The problem The central problem to solve is that the Landing has some serious usability issues that reduce its effectiveness and uptake. Some of these are deeply architectural and difficult or impossible to fix without some radical (and likely harmful in other ways) re-engineering. Others may be lower hanging fruit. The objective of this project is not to attain perfection, but to make tangible and useful improvements. Athabasca Landing is built using the Elgg framework. It uses many plugins on top of the Elgg framework to provide very many functions and features, and this is a big part of the problem: as a result, it tends to have far too much of a tools focus, with each tool potentially (and often actually) doing similar things in slightly different ways. The framework that binds them together also plays a role in reducing usability, making decisions about (for instance) where to place menu items or interface elements. It is also a general purpose social site so, for specific uses and tasks that have a strong workflow, tends to be less than optimal. There is also (very intentionally) a lot of content that may not be relevant or useful for individuals, that can make it confusing for those trying to focus on specific tasks. There are also, most likely, some poor interface design solutions to be found here and there (the theme was thrown together by a web designer many years ago, and really needs to be updated). Because of its use of the Elgg framework, making significant changes, especially when they affect the whole site, can be quite complex, due to a lot of possible dependency problems and side-effects. You should also be warned that Elgg uses a combination of methods to apply a theme to the site, including some CSS, some scripting, and some JQuery: this is powerful, but complex to manage. It is extremely important, to keep the site maintainable, that changes are not made to any of the system core, nor to third-party or core plugins, that constitute about 2/3 of the site plugins. Thanks to the elegant Elgg object model it is, however, usually fairly straightforward to override behaviours and themes of any and all plugins, so most changes can be localized within a single plugin. Warning: though it is intended that the site will persist for some time, it will eventually be retired and replaced with something else that may or may not use the Elgg framework. This will none-the-less be a useful project because the theme that is developed may be used for different sites, and what is learned will, it is hoped, result in at least one publication on lessons learned. The tasks To analyze usability issues with the site To identify potential solutions To implement those solutions as an Elgg plugin. To evaluate its success Skills needed are mostly in the area of UX design and evaluation. However, anyone taking on this project also needs a fair grasp of PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, and CSS, and will have to learn the Elgg framework (which, with a very fully-featured API and not much help from tutorials or books on the subject, is not a trivial task).