Blackboard UX Fail! How not to label buttons.
Several times in my experiences with Blackboard, I have accidentally clicked the wrong button. In Blackboard's forum thread editing screen, there are both Save and Submit buttons.
There are three problems with this display:
- Both button terms are ambiguous (Save to what? Submit to for what?)
- These terms are often used interchangeably
- The buttons are right next to each other with no contextual distinction
Yes, there is help text, but (a) its location under the textarea (instead of near the buttons) demarcates it as pertaining to the text area, (b) depending on screen resolution (I shrunk my window substantially to take the screenshot), the text may be on the other side of the screen from the buttons, and (c) the help text requires an additional cognitive step to recognize and then use.
The simple solution would have been to label the buttons "Save Draft" and "Post to Forum".
And to add insult to injury, once you have clicked "Save", you are navigated away from the post and back to a list of already posted items. Obviously, the draft you just saved will not be there. In fact, one has to navigate some highly non-inuitive filters to find the "Drafts" section and then find the saved forum post.
Again, this could be easily remedied by (a) returning the user to the editor after "Save" is clicked, and (b) making it easier to find drafts of messages. Selecting filters in a search is non-ideal.
