[Account Settings] More intuitive term sorting/presentation

[SethBattis]

So, my impression is that terms are sorted based on date and, perhaps, name. But it doesn't seem consistent. For example, here's the term order on the admin Terms page, which appears to be in descending order by start date, with terms with the same dates sorted alphabetically. Which makes sense.

But now, when I go to a term pull-down menu, that order is reversed, putting my active terms at the bottom of the list:

I see three key improvements to be made in the presentation of terms:

1. Let's be consistent and use the same order in every listing. Doesn't matter what order -- but it should be the same. I don't have the bandwidth to re-figure this out every time I look at it.
2. Let's make sure the active terms are most readily available. This probably means that they should stay at the top of the Terms page and move to the top of the drop-down menu.
3. Let's mark active terms so that they're more readily apparent. For example (as you can see below), I use some CSS to highlight active courses in user details -- that visual cue for active terms would be great. And in the drop-down, there could be a divider between the active terms (top of the menu, ideally) and the inactive terms (bottom of the menu, ideally).

(As an aside… what on earth order are courses listed in? I mean… jeez. Also, obviously, I fiddled with the CSS of the div that holds the course listing so it autosizes to include everything, rather than just display 3 or 4 courses.)

[SethBattis]

Well… I do have a term or two that have no dates associated with them, so that they are just always open. But I could create that same phenomenon by picking a start date like Thursday, January 1, 1970.

[hesspe]

or even a start date of today would work, right?

[SethBattis]

Probably, yes.

[allison]

Thanks, everyone, for your feedback and comments. I am currently planning a project of small UX enhancements for Admins and this seems like a great candidate for my wishlist of fixes. I don't have a timeline on when the changes would be implemented, but I do want to dig a little deeper and get an estimate from our engineers. I will be limiting my research this go around to lists and dropdown menus containing terms. Changing how courses are listed or sorted other places in the UI would be a separate (but important) feature request.

I'd like to start by assembling a complete and prioritized list of these locations so I can get an estimate from our engineers. Exact URLS would be really helpful for our UX team, for example:

Admin Courses Page https://allison.instructure.com/accounts/1

Admin Users Page https://allison.instructure.com/accounts/1/users

Admin Terms Page https://allison.instructure.com/accounts/1/terms

Admin Settings Page https://allison.instructure.com/accounts/1/settings

Are there any others we should add?

 @SethBattis ​, I really like your suggested categorization. Does anyone on the thread have different ideas about how terms should be categorized? We'll definitely reach out to the community for additional feedback once this request makes its way to design.

Thanks again everyone!

[SethBattis]

Deactivated user​, here's my list of where I see the terms list showing up:

• https://stmarksschool.instructure.com/accounts/:account_id
  1. The drop-down for Show courses from the term
  2. The Add a New Course pop-up has a terms drop-down menu
  3. As courses are listed in the Find a Course field
  4. Potentially even organizing the course listing by term as well (that would be _hot_).
• https://stmarksschool.instructure.com/accounts/1/terms -- obviously here.
• https://stmarksschool.instructure.com/users/:user_id​ -- under Enrollments
• https://stmarksschool.instructure.com/accounts/:account_id/users/:user_id -- under Enrollments
• https://stmarksschool.instructure.com/courses/:course_id/settings-- in the drop-down menu for Term
• https://stmarksschool.instructure.com/courses/:course_id/content_migrations​ -- As courses are listed in the Search for a course field

[btatham]

I agree. Too many terms for each school especially if your school has been a customer for many years. Too bad that the old terms could be set to a "disable" phase so that they are no longer viewable. Not sure if deleting them makes sense when I don't know the extent of harm that would cause to the data integrity.......????

[allison]

 @SethBattis ​, I have taken an inventory and screenshot of each of these URLs you shared and added them to a larger project for making small improvements to the Admin UI. This is something we definitely want to do but it's not something we can commit to during the next six months. I will archive this idea in the meantime.

Thanks, everyone, for your input. This a solid idea and something I'm excited to work on just as soon as we can squeeze it in.

[scook]

I added another request to hopefully get this higher on the list to do.  Here is the request  

Hopefully we can get this done sooner than later and take in to account the additional idea of show / hide.

[scook]

I am going to try to get this done a bit faster by doing another vote, check it out.  Thanks

[scook]

I am want this to change sooner than later, lets try and vote it agian  

Thanks.