Fluid Project Plan, April 2007-March 2009

Document Status

This project plan is a living document and is reviewed and updated regularly in order to accurately reflect the community's state of progress. The last significant revision was made in January 2008.

Project Goals

1. Contribute to the improvement of usability and accessibility within Sakai, uPortal, and OpenCollection. Support UX concerns in Kuali Student, Moodle, and other communities.
2. Share open source user interface design patterns across communities
3. Provide tools and resources to empower communities:
   • UX Walkthroughs
   • User personas and profiles within the higher education and museum communities
   • User collaboration, contextual inquiring, and usability testing
4. Build a DHTML development framework enabling reusable user interface components:
   • Low-level accessibility supports in the jQuery toolkit
   • Unified, pure HTML templates on the server
   • Conventions and APIs for a collaborative, markup-based architecture with the server
   • APIs for building your own flexible UI components
   • Accessibility customization services
5. Create a library of reusable, well-designed, and accessible user interface components
   • File management
   • Navigation
   • Collaborate with the Sakai, uPortal, and OpenCollection communities to integrate Fluid components into released versions of the software

Defining Releases

Fluid's release plans reflect a layered approach; the core framework team breaks work up into regular iterations, usually two weeks in length, to ensure our progress is visible to the entire community and to better respond to the needs of our user experience stakeholders. Packaged, documented versions of the software are released quarterly.

1. 0.x Releases: Released quarterly and announced to the public on the fluid-announce mailing list; packaged, documented, and supported.
2. Major Version Release: Only one during the Mellon-funded period; aim for a full Fluid 1.0 release by March 2009

How Planning Works

We try to keep our planning process as light and simple as possible, recognizing that priorities and tasks shift over time, and that we'd prefer to spend our working on great designs. The Fluid team has three levels of plans:

• The project plan: this document. A high-level view of the goals and deliverables of the funded project as a whole
• Release plans: more detail the deliverables we expect to include in each release
• Iteration plans: usually based on a two-week iteration, this lets us track individual tasks and assignments

More information on Fluid's planning process.

Component Prioritization Plan

The approach we've taken to prioritizing which components we work on and when is based on combining known issues in Sakai, uPortal, and OpenCollection with ongoing user research and a strategic direction towards re-envisioning how content is managed in both applications. We will continue to collect suggestions for components from stakeholders and experts in the communities. Early prioritization of these suggestions will be based on educated guesses and identifying clearly problematic yet manageable areas to improve. As progress is made on the UX Walkthroughs, usability studies, and user research, our priorities will be driven by the results of this research. We'll also make some key component choices based on the desire to address critical accessibility customizations and accommodations where necessary, allowing us to explore runtime adaptations of the user interface.

Impact of the Fluid Deliverables

The Fluid technologies will be closely integrated into essential aspects of the Sakai, uPortal, and OpenCollection applications. We will work closely with existing teams and project stakeholders to do this in a highly collaborative, community-led manner. While the details may shift based on the need to responsively target high priority problems, we expect to see Fluid's largest impacts in the following areas:

• File Management:
  • Uploading content
  • Finding, selecting, and working with content
  • Tagging and metadata

• Navigation:
  • Organizing page sections and portlets
  • Identifying favourites and landmarks within a portal or site
  • Customizable tabs that scale gracefully

• Accessibility:
  • Customizable keyboard navigation
  • ARIA support for assistive technologies
  • Flexible presentation: adjustable fonts, layouts, etc.
  • jQuery accessibility plugins and mentorship

• Framework:
  • Unified, pure HTML templates on the server side
  • Component model for enabling customization and configurability
  • Conventions and APIs for markup-driven user interfaces

Project Status

A project status document is periodically updated to reflect the progress of our work and ways you can get involved.

• Current Project Status

Release Milestones

April-July 2007: Community Building

Goals:

• Get started
• Install, configure and use community infrastructure: mailing lists, wiki, etc.
• Recruit volunteers and nurture a healthy community of UX expertise
• Demonstrate our technology direction by demonstrating a viable "first slice" component

Deliverables:

• July 2007 Project Plan

August-November 2007: Fluid 0.1

Goals:

• Get the Lightbox and Reorderer into the hands of developers
• Establish a release process

Deliverables:

• Fluid 0.1 Project Plan

December 2007: (No Release)

Goals:

• Planning user research
• Improvements to Fluid 0.1 deployment bundle

Deliverables:

• December 2007 UX Team Plan

January-May 2008: Fluid 0.3

Goals:

• Talk with users: build up a firm foundation of understanding of user practices and needs
• Build new components and flesh out framework designs

Deliverables:

• Fluid 0.3. Framework Deliverables
• Fluid 0.3 UX Project Plan

June-July 2008: Fluid 0.4

Goals:

• Build the Inline Edit and Pager components
• Launch and collaborate on the Open Source Design Patterns Library
• Introduce a preview version of client-side template rendering

  Deliverables:

• Fluid 0.4 Framework Deliverables
• Fluid 0.4 UX Team Plan

August-September 2008: Fluid 0.6

Goals:

• Build a user preferences editing component
• Integrate runtime accessibility adaptations based on user preferences
• Release extensive new design patterns

  Deliverables:

• Fluid 0.6 Framework Deliverables
• Fluid 0.6 UX Team Plan

October-December 2008: Fluid 0.8

Goals:

• New components
• Community outreach and training

Deliverables:

• Fluid 0.8 Framework Deliverables
• Fluid 0.8 UX Team Plan

January-March 2009: Fluid 1.0

Goals:

• Build new components
• Refine UX Toolkit
• Release version 2.0 of the Open Source Design Patterns Library
• Community sustainability

Deliverables:

• Fluid 1.0 Framework Deliverables
• Fluid 1.0 UX Team Plan