Assylbek Zhumadyrov

Sahana, UI

Audience: the audience of this project is all users of Sahana system from quests and regular users to administrators.

Goals: the main goal of this project is to design the easiest and simplest interface for users of Sahana. Achieving this goal will include two main steps:

1. designing a logical model of the entire Sahana system to make addition of new modules and future growth more proper and logical;

2. designing user friendly interface for all users;

The second point is more important and will be described in details later.

Is it important?

The main idea behind this project is making disaster consequences handling easier and quicker. By designing user friendly interface navigating and action performing will be easier and faster which is vital in case of Sahana system when people’s lives are the price of the reaction time. To do so it is important to have a logical model of the entire system. There are many developers of Sahana all over the world and they have added and keep adding lots of features into that system. As a result we have the system which is full of features but has lack of logic in it.

One very important point and at the same time, the main problem, is to design user friendly interface without rebuilding entire system including database. Designing user friendly interface includes several steps:

1. designing intuitive and comfortable navigation system (menus);

2. designing all menus the way so only the links/sections that are available for that particular type of user would appear on the page (administrator, quest, volunteer etc.);

I will work on it as on my final project in masters in Information Technologies. Any feedback will be useful. Will keep posting some material right here as i move on. Thanks everyone.

This great architecture image of the Sahana GIS (and its surroundings) framework was created by Diki an co., for the ToT F/OSS-GIS & SAHANA Workshop last year:

Sahana GIS Architecture - Tux version

Original Image Source: SahanaCentral.IOSN.Telehealth.ph

Posted on the Humanitarian-ICT list:

IBM Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs is pleased to host a 4-day training workshop, in Manila, Philippines, February 19-24, 2009 (excluding weekend), on Sahana. As you may know, IBM has partnered with Lanka Software Foundation and the Sahana community in support of Sahana deployments following humanitarian disasters, most recently in China following the May 2008 earthquake and in India following the August 2008 flooding in Bihar State. This workshop is to build additional capacity for successful Sahana deployments in the region.

The four-day workshop will provide an overview of disaster management concepts and a comprehensive curriculum in Sahana user skills; administrator and configuration skills for those wishing to support installation, setup, and training/use of Sahana; and developer information for coders wishing to customize Sahana.

Source: Humanitarian-ICT mailing list

Professor Jeff Sonstein has contributed to discussions about Sahana in the past, and I’ve found those contributions to be very useful. His approach is very much from the user side rather than the developer side, which to be perfectly honest has been a big gap in the Sahana community. He sent around a message on the sahana-user mailing list, with a link to this page of feedback on the Sahana UI.

One of the classes I am again teaching this term here at RIT is called Website Design & Implementation… Sahana was conceived during a real emergency to meet real needs. Over time, the great work done by the initial and follow-up development teams has fleshed out the system to add needed functionality. This is a great start, but one major area needing work now that Sahana has grown so is that of the “user experience”. I wanted to comment on four (4) areas which came up in today’s in-class discussion of Sahana, all of which pertain to the “user experience” encountering Sahana.

All of these comments are worth considering - very specific to Sahana, but rooted in good practice in usability. We could use more feedback like this which can help developers to move towards a more usable version of Sahana - so if anybody out there has anything like that, then please feel free to join the community at sahana-user. It’s difficult to engage non-technical people in the Sahana effort, but this kind of feedback can be a useful contribution from anybody.

UPDATE: another good example of non-technical contributions to Sahana is the translation process, which has a home at Sahana Online Translation, thanks to the astonishing commitment of Dominic Konig - thanks Dominic!

(This post is cross-posted at humanitarian.info.)