Moodle is a free course-management tool that many schools (including mine) use to manage the online components of courses (including computer-graded quizzes, discussion forums, and the submission of online papers). The tool is powerful, but the interface offers a bewildering array of options, so that casual users are often dismayed by how many checkboxes it takes to configure an operation that seems like it should be a simple thing.

Overheard at Quora: “Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?”

I would love it if we had loads of UX specialists at our disposal full-time but we just don’t.   Remember Moodle is open source and most people pay us nothing for it.   We need to focus on a lot of different areas such as stability, performance, backend functionality, education features, accessibility, standards etc as well, so the UX work is always a subset of our work.

That said the frontend is a major priority for us, and if you haven’t looked at Moodle recently you might be surprised by all the improvements in recent versions.   We’re also making a lot of changes to how themes work so that designers can produce ever-more awesome responsive themes so that we give admins more options. —moodlenews.com