The first step was to analyze how many navigation menus are currently being used within the LMS. This would assist us when designing surveys but also get us thinking are some of the most common menu items used.
6 standardized navigation menus were discovered, each with a slight difference from the other. This also didn’t take into account the customized menus that live locally in courses. So the next task was to identify how many custom menus are being used by instructors and how they influence students' learning experience in their courses.
We reached out to other institutions that use D2L Brightspace LMS to see what they were doing with their navigation menus.
St. Petersburg Community College
“We do lock down our nav bar. We tried out the idea of allowing faculty to customize it with our first pilot group and we found that faculty would get rid of things accidentally and then couldn’t get them back.”
Pima Community College
“The navigation bar is pretty much locked down with little to no adjustment. It takes a wondrous feat to get it changed or updated.”
Before beginning to design new iterations of a nav menu, we checked data for the tools with the most usage by students. This was critical in determining which tools to prioritize in the new design to make sure we don’t create inaccessible learning experiences for students.
#1 Content ≈ 6,700 users
#2 Calendar ≈ 6,600 users
#3 Assignment ≈ 6,500 users
The redesign of the nav menu was an iterative process. 7 rounds of iterations were developed, where every round was critiqued by stakeholders.
2 foundational menus were designed that were used as guide to create the final iteration.
Through research we made sure to know the limitations of D2L Brightspace and the various ways instructors could create a custom nav menu. We discovered that D2L has a Links tool that allows instructors to insert custom links into a specific page. Also, if instructors didn't need certain tools in the navigation, they would be allowed to, turn tools off from the admin settings.
Lock the navigation menu and allow for custom links through the Links tool!
Three final iterations were designed and were ready to be tested.
A moderated usability study was developed to a/b test the 3 menus. Before testing the usability study with students we tested it with stakeholders from our department to assure it was perfect.
A group of 6 diverse students was raffled to test the menus. Some of these students used assistive technologies to navigate their courses.
Having unclear drop-down labels makes it confusing and time-consuming to access links for users who use screen readers.
5 out of 6 participants liked the idea of categorization and drop-downs in the menu.
6 out of 6 participants didn’t know the Course Title was a link to Course Home.
Based on the feedback, we reintroduced the Home link in the menu and made sure not to put the most commonly used tool, Content, in a drop-down. We adjusted the label names on the drop-down categories to best represent all the tools housed in them.
Final navigation menu site map
We took advantage of soft-launching the navigation menu during the summer term, which is relatively slower than other terms. We piloted the navigation menu with 16 courses.
79% of students found the new navigation menu easy to use.
85% liked the new navigation menu.