Has anyone transitioned to Canvas from D2L Brightspace, Blackboard, or Moodle?

[jelarv]

As an educator who actively seeks technology solutions that benefit student learning and streamline course management, I'm genuinely puzzled by my Canvas experience after five weeks of use. Having previously used other LMS platforms, I'm encountering what feel like fundamental design oversights that impact my teaching effectiveness (to dispel concerns that my problems are "user error" due to technological incompetence, I should mention that my colleagues often turn to me as the "tech guy").

Having been extensively using Canvas since my arrival at a new university 5 weeks ago, I'm seeing patterns that suggest insufficient user experience testing during development. Basic features that should be intuitive require multiple tries, aren't available at all (like showing students only their incorrect quiz answers, which both D2L Brightspace and Blackboard support natively) or are illogical (why is there a "Share with me" option in Item Banks...why would anyone need to share with themself?  That defies the definition of "share").

When I was building websites for my business, someone recommended the book "Don't Make Me Think" which essentially says the app user shouldn't have to pause and ask "What do I do next?" or "How do I do what I want to do?" and instead it should be intuitive, but that only comes with extensive user testing (this philosophy is how Steve Jobs championed the Mac and iPhone in what were already saturated markets...they were the first devices that were intuitive to use).

I discovered the University of Washington's Canvas evaluation found that "instructors still experience Canvas as a poor fit with their desired teaching practices" and noted "many instructors still experience Canvas as 'clunky," which suggests my concerns aren't isolated.

My goal isn't to criticize but to see if others have a similar view.  If not, I'll be quiet.  But if so, it might send a message to Instructure that it needs to invest in user testing and update for what I consider the missing, counterintuitive, and complicated aspects of its current design.

[VPundir · Accepted solution]

I transitioned to Canvas after having used Moodle and Blackboard. While Moodle was fine, I found Blackboard tedious, clunky and unintuitive - and slow to boot. By contrast, I find Canvas faster, cleaner and easier to use.

Is it perfect? Of course not! There are 169 pages of ideas submitted by the community about everything from features to workflows to UI, attesting to that fact.

Yes, usability experts like Krug (author of Don't Make Me Think), Nielsen and Norman advocate user testing - importantly, UI testing before development, such as via paper prototypes, digital mockups, etc. And I am sure Instructure and most large software companies do that. However, effective testing can be done only with real users, which is why Betas or Feature Previews are important. The nature of the beast is such that most customers (institutions) do not want to participate in the testing of a product they are paying good money for, and even at the institutions that do participate in feature previews, very often, the testing is limited to the techs/administrators, rather than instructors. 

Besides, Instructure and many other software companies generally do ship out products first and fix the issues later, as did Steve Jobs and Apple.

Of course, there are also numerous design principles already established based on decades of testing and real-world usage. And some rather important ones are regularly ignored by just about every company.