Canvas iCon or Dashboard?

[ravmitterhoff]

The canvas icon on the upper left side of the interface takes me to the dashboard. Does that make sense? There is alos a dashboard icon on the left hand side that takes me to the dashboard. Why the redundancy? 

[kona]

ravmitterhoff, welcome to the Canvas Community! Since this is a question about the design of Canvas I'm flipping this to a discussion so we can have the conversation without searching for a right/wrong answer. 

Personally it doesn't bother me and as an Admin I've never had an Instructor or student complain about it confusing them. So, while I agree that it is redundant, it doesn't seem to be a harmful redundancy. As to the why... I'm honestly not sure and I'm not sure anyone in the Community can truly answer the why to that either. I know past experience with other websites has shown that quite often clicking on the logo for the company/brand will take me back to the "home page," but they also normally have a specific link or button that will do it as well. My "guess" is that Canvas wanted their logo prominently visible (because what company wouldn't?) and figured it was better to have that logo (that looks like a button) do something rather than nothing (and potentially confuse people more as to why isn't this thing that looks like a button not working?). 

Since you're looking at Canvas with fresh eyes, did you have a recommendation or idea as to what the Canvas icon should direct people to? Or do you think the Dashboard icon should be removed and just leave the Canvas icon? I've been using Canvas for 5+ years so it's always interesting and useful to hear what people new to the system think and observe.

Thanks!

[ravmitterhoff]

They should remove the dashboard icon if they want to keep canvas icon. Having two icons do the same thing makes the user feel that something is broken. It's confusing.

[rake_9]

It's been awhile since I've seen a "fresh" install of Canvas, but I'm pretty sure I'm remembering things correctly.  My comments below are based on that assumption; my apologies if I've mis-remembered how we did this.

The Theme editor lets you replace the top Canvas icon with an icon of your choosing; you can also associate a URL of your own choosing with your own icon.  (I am nearly positive the first change is in the theme editor; the second one might in the uploaded file with custom scripts and formatting.)

At Ohio State, we have replaced the Canvas icon with one generally associated with our LMS service (it is a graduate cap, FWIW).  The link takes people to a site with our own suite of course management tools.