4.1 Current fragmented ecosystem
A typical student in Newcastle University is introduced to a nebulous and fragmented ecosystem. It lacks a unified architecture and this results in a lot of time being wasted trying to learn, unlearn and re-learn interactions. At the moment, Newcastle University employs a set of apps listed as follows:
Blackboard: Keeps track of student materials. NESS: University's own interface to keep track of student data and coursework deadlines and submission. Timetables: A web interface to timetables. Library: A dedicated website for library to search for books at various libraries of university, keeps track of loaned books. Outlook: Web based email client developed by Microsoft Crypt: Archive of exam papers
NUVision: Archive of lecture videos.
These are some of the web applications that a student typically comes in contact on a day to day basis. A preliminary analysis of the user interface of these apps reveals that almost none of them share consistent user interaction patterns that help ease the user experience. The only superficial one that can be pointed out is the Shibboleth Gateway which enables access to all the apps from a single point entry.
Observations
Some people go on to refresh the browser which can be simply eliminate with an email notification which user can enable when they want to be updated or this data can be shown on the Dashboard using websockets if they prefer. This is detrimental for the server which takes redundant hits and for the user since he is pointlessly clicking on the reload button when there's no actual update. This induces a lot of time consuming behaviour such as constantly refreshing the NESS (current portal for getting marks at Newcastle.) This in my opinion is serious time that can be spent elsewhere in a more productive manner.
One another problem that results from the apps not sharing a common database is that there is no apparent semantic separation of concerns between the apps. Blackboard application displays the coursework deadlines on a notification area which is immune to changes done in NESS. This discrepancy results in confusion among the students since there are two incongruous representation of the same data. Each app deployed in the university at the moment takes care of more than one thing with apparently distinct databases.
This dissertation proposes that much better can be done by imposing an architecture that ties together all the different apps with the same visual language. As outlined in the design section, all the apps shown here are designed with core precept of having conceptual integrity internally as well as amongst them. An overall architecture and visual language has been developed to describe all the applications from the ground up.
This problem can be eradicated by having a consistent knowledge repository. My research pointed at two ways to achieve this. One is to have a centralized database that takes care of all the information single handedly. Other approach, which is much more resilient in nature, is to have a distributed database that keeps the information in synchronization across the different applications. This dissertation adopts the former approach of having a centralized architecture since it was of importance that the various requirements and contracts between the data had to be figured out before a distributed database was deployed.
But the major advantage of having separated these apps at their concern boundaries is that it allows for much more focused development. By condensing the amount of information each app holds it drastically reduce the amount of complexity budget the student has to store in her head while navigating a user interface. Unlike Blackboard, which is a melting pot of everything university related, each application in this ecosystem does one thing and one thing only. This endows the user to determine the most salient information faster since the number of choices and user interface acrobatics she has to perform is reduced.