Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

Krist, Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. My guests today are my long-standing colleagues at Catalyst, Doris Tam and Evonne Cheung. They led the recent redesign of Mahara, launched at the end of April 2026. Usually, the focus of the interviews is more on the pedagogical side of things. Why portfolios are wonderful ways to engage people in their learning and how they support them. Part of that support, of course, then also is the platform that people use to create digital portfolios. Since all three of us are on the Mahara team, we put the platform centre stage today to explain why we've reviewed and ultimately redesigned it. So, this episode is a bit more, let's say, technical because we are going to take a little look into our development process and how the redesign came about. Welcome to the podcast, Evonne and Doris.

Evonne Cheung: 1:23

Thank you, Kristina. Lovely to be here.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:26

Evonne has actually been the longest serving team member of the Mahara project team. So, let's start with you, Evonne. What is your role on the team?

Evonne Cheung: 1:35

I am the Senior Visual Designer at Catalyst, and I've been involved with Mahara since 2006. So for the latest 26.04 release, I led the design and front-end development for the new UI, and I'm also responsible for Mahara brand design and visual materials that go out.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:58

So all the things where you see a Mahara logo, Mahara banner, and all the lovely graphics, also here for the podcast, for example, Evonne has been responsible for that, and you've actually really started the brand of Mahara because shortly after you joined Catalyst in 2006, you were asked to come up with a logo and then the initial brand and have evolved it since then. It's also good to see how it has evolved, based on how, of course, visual design has changed over the years, and also the needs of the platform. I still remember one of our conversations around Mahara 1.8 when we had a lot of little icons on the dashboard and lots of little things, very cutesy looking, which was a bit more for younger learners, and then we reviewed who was actually using Mahara at that time, and it was more in higher education and then also going more into workplace, and that's when you then had a hard look at the visuals of Mahara and paired it back, made it more modern, less cutesy, more refined, and we've kept up with that since. That's why I think it's really important to have you on the team as the visual designer because that is what people see first of the platform.

Evonne Cheung: 3:34

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:35

But we don't just have visual design in the team, all the ideas that Rob, our business analyst, had done in terms of the information architecture, and that you then, Evonne, took on to create the visual story, of course, also needs developers to then implement that in a platform. That's why we also have Doris on the podcast today. What is your role?

Doris Tam: 3:59

I'm a developer on the Mahara team, and I've been around almost eight years, so nowhere near as long as Evonne.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:07

Doris, you actually started with us as an intern, right?

Doris Tam: 4:11

Yes, I started while I was in my second year of uni.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:15

Before that, also you were on the Catalyst Open Source Academy, you had written Behat tests, so automation tests, for the Mahara project when you were on the Academy and then also continued with that work a bit when you joined the team as an intern and then went on to doing more development work because we kept you since then.

Doris Tam: 4:39

Yes, I have been around you for a very long time, since some high school days.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:45

What interested you to come back after the academy?

Doris Tam: 4:50

The initial trigger to start looking at internships was based on a requirement at uni, and a friend of mine reminded me that I did the Academy in high school and that I had some contacts in the industry. Because the usual way people get internships as a uni student is through Summer of Tech, and it's like 100 roles available for 1,000s of students. So I was very fortunate to have met people in industry through the Open Source Academy.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:18

And so it's been really cool to have you on the project for so long. Before we get into the redesign, recently, Doris, in one of our team meetings, you shared a metaphor that you use when you describe portfolios. What would you say?

Doris Tam: 5:34

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to talk to some interns and some high school students, so I created this metaphor to explain to them what Mahara was in a way that they could understand. And that was a backpack, one that you carry through different stages of your life, and the things that you put inside of the stuff you learn, the stuff you've made, the things you've reflected on, and it's very intentional because you choose what goes in, and then over time it starts to tell a story about who you are and where you're heading.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:02

I find that a really cool metaphor because it is very relatable and gives a good idea of what you can do with portfolios. But now, I had already mentioned that at the end of April we launched Mahara 26.04, our latest release of the portfolio platform, and both of you had been very instrumental in that and led the design and also development work of it, and so can you tell me, please, what the main goal was of that big redesign that we just published?

Evonne Cheung: 6:40

We had quite a few different goals in mind with the redesign, but the biggest one was probably improving how people actually experience and use Mahara. We wanted it to feel simpler and more intuitive, so that people could get things done without running into roadblocks or unnecessary confusion. We also wanted to modernise the interface because Mahara is a 20-year old system, and while I may have been a spring chicken when we first designed Mahara [laughs], it's an entirely new generation of people who use it now, and they interact with it differently to how we would have 20 years ago. So it was time for a cleaner, more accessible, and fully responsive interface, something that works across all the different devices and screen sizes. That's just the baseline expectation for modern software now that we really need to meet. And then there's a broader brand product goal. We want Mahara to evolve visually and position itself more strongly alongside our competitors. So a UI that is polished and well designed helps build that trust and confidence in our product. We want people to see that we genuinely care about the people that Mahara services, and we want to make their lives easier and support them through their learning journey, and ultimately help people discover and benefit from what Mahara can offer.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:17

Yeah, and we had made steps in redesigning Mahara over the years. We had a UX review in the early 2010s, in particular, also changed icons and how much is actually being displayed in certain areas of Mahara, changed certain navigation elements within pages, but those were more targeted changes rather than a complete overhaul of the entire platform, and that I think was really critical this time around to not just look at specific functionalities, but the platform in its entirety.

Evonne Cheung: 8:55

The previous redesign wasn't so much design related, it was more we needed to get it onto Bootstrap and make sure that we can align everything to Bootstrap. But yeah, it wasn't a design-led situation where this one was.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:11

Doris, do you want to add anything?

Doris Tam: 9:13

I think Evonne's covered a lot. Cohesion, making things consistent, easier to use for people.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:20

How do you think this redesign now will impact learners in the future?

Doris Tam: 9:26

To make the navigation much more consistent and easier to use, I hope that they will mean less cognitive load when navigating and allowing them to just focus on what they need to build in their portfolio, gathering their evidence rather than being held back by not being able to figure out how to do things.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:45

So quite a big accessibility component that we've also worked on then throughout this release because cognitive load and making workflows easier, needing less reorienting are all important in order to not have so many question marks on people's faces when they are in front of the platform.

Doris Tam: 10:07

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:08

What bent into the redesign then for the two of you? Rob came up with a set of wireframes that then came to Evonne because the wireframes show the structure, but don't give an idea about what the platform then looks like in terms of colours, fonts, and ultimately also the feel that we want to convey.

Evonne Cheung: 10:46

From Rob's wireframes, which really establishes the structure and overall flow of the experience, I, with my designer hat on, was there to build on that foundation and design the UI in Figma, which involved creating multiple concepts, layouts, components, and thinking about all the different states and contexts of these components, and how it would appear across the platform, and how they would interact with each other, as well. So, a big focus for me at that time was finding the right balance between workflows and usability, while still keeping the design system very customisable because one of the more challenging aspects of this redesign was recognising that Mahara UI essentially acts as the main theme for the product as well as the parent theme for any child theme that comes along for other institutions.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:47

So if somebody wanted to put their own brand on it, they can do that and don't have to start from scratch, but they build on top of what you had done.

Evonne Cheung: 11:55

Exactly, so that whatever I set up as the foundation, design needs to still be flexible enough that an institution could come and still adapt the UI to suit whatever their brand or identity needs without a mountain of customisation, which we had before.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:14

Evonne, you mentioned that you have a design system, and that is a term that many people might not be familiar with. So, if I break that down for myself, what you did, and also what Rob had already done in the wireframes, is that we are using components consistently throughout Mahara so that when you encounter a button, it always looks like a button. If we encounter buttons that are grouped together, they always look the same, so that we can achieve consistency throughout, which, of course, then also supports accessibility and usability because people don't have to reorient themselves all the time again.

Evonne Cheung: 12:54

That's right. Having design system means that we also have a base for the team. So people can reference this is how the button should look like. This is how accordion should look like, and when you should be using certain components, and what situations. We have all that established and planned out, so that we're not just randomly going, okay, we're gonna change this experience to go from cards to a random form, and then a button. So we have a very consistent and organic flow that we've established in the design system that we repeat throughout the site.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:34

Which I think is also really important, not just for our team, but also recognising that Mahara is an open source project. Therefore, contributors outside of Catalyst can also work on that. Having that established design system helps them create their code more easily because they don't have to think about what does a button need to look like, or which icon set can I use? All of those base decisions have already been made, and they can simply use them to then also slot in their functionality more easily into the visual design of Mahara.

Evonne Cheung: 14:11

And also people think that design is just visuals or styling, colouring, that sort of thing. But really, a good design is when you don't see the design, and you would only notice it when it's not there, and that was my aim - pare everything back, make the flow work. The design shouldn't get in the way of everything else. The design is the flow.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:36

Often we notice bad design when something bugs us, but as non-designer, I might not necessarily know why it's bugging me. I just know that something is off. Whereas when it's good design, typically we just accept it. It helps have a much better experience on a website. So, you've established the design system, you gave Mahara a nice look, and then it needed to get to the point of implementing that in the code.

Evonne Cheung: 15:05

There I take off my designer hat and I put on my front-end dev hat, it has less feathers and unicorns, but still is just as colourful [laughs]. From that point that was when Doris and I started to pull everything apart and rebuild it piece by piece. I can't stress enough how big a load this is for Doris in particular [laughs] because I'm not technical or developery at all, and even just us trying to understand how the theme inheritance worked, that took Doris drawing out a flow diagram for me to visually explain it to me. So it was a really challenging process to work through a 20-year old system where it's been through a lot of different development approaches and contributions and trying to untangle the layers of customisation that's been done, pare it back to something that's more consistent and cohesive and maintainable as we move into the future. There was a lot of all caps messages sent to Doris when I broke things intentionally, and she always found a way to calmly figure a way out how to implement the design changes that are needed. Seeing the final product come together and being able to significantly reduce the amount of complexity and bloat in the actual backend code that has been built up over the years is a really nice thing to see.

Doris Tam: 16:42

We tag teamed the whole thing. The 26.04 release would be nothing without the design, but also one of my personal goals for the redesign was to make sure that Evonne's design vision came through into the final product, and that the technical side didn't hold it back. I learned a lot because I didn't realise from a developer's perspective how important design thinking was in the code. So, a lot of development side, you usually think about the logic, but you never think about how this is going to help or hold back a designer from making the changes that they want. Usually, the design is like the CSS, you add on top of the markup, or the structure is already created, but in this redesign, when we pulled everything back and started from literally nothing, it was, how can a designer make their changes in a streamlined way while being logically scalable and make sense to a developer side as well? Yeah, there was a lot of collaboration.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:39

That is also, I find, imperative because it does have that ultimate goal still connected to who is using the site and making it easier for them. Do you want to add anything else?

Doris Tam: 17:53

The whole redesign wasn't just me and Evonne. It was a lot of iteration, it was a lot of me, Evonne, and Rob just head butting constantly of me trying to retain existing functionality, Evonne wanting to make things pretty, and then the wireframes that Rob created not quite working, so we had to mish-mash and rethink multiple times, and then when there were new designs to be decided, it would come back to the team, and then everyone would have some input, as well as Kristina with like input, like vision, and the direction for Mahara to make everyone on the same page as possible before getting to implementation.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:35

And we also had the other developers on the team working on it as well at times. It's really amazing having had the opportunity then, since roughly about March to demonstrate the new design more fully because, of course, before some things were not quite there yet, and so once we could actually demonstrate Mahara, even before we released it, it was really good to see how people already responded to it when we had our 'Ask me anything' sessions and how we could also get that feedback early on in order to validate what you had done and that it was very necessary to redo Mahara in order to stay contemporary and use modern ways of navigating a website as much as possible, so that it was easier for people who use Mahara now to use it. So, what's then next for the two of you?

Doris Tam: 19:37

On the redesign side, there were some areas in Mahara that we didn't have capacity to get done during 26.04 that we would like to continue and improve on in those areas for usability as well as begin to seek feedback from the community on how they find 26.04 to further improve what we've presented.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:58

And also when we implement new features that they fit into that frame. We definitely had much more business analysis input than we had had an opportunity beforehand. That really shows that a software is not just developed by a couple of people, but that it does need business analysis, usability, graphic design, development, and then also testing in order to bring that project together. And then, of course, also not to forget the people for whom we are actually building the software because we are not creating the software for the creation of the software's sake, but really for the people using it. And so that takes us then to the last three questions for you that I ask of everybody. How would you describe portfolio work? Doris, do you want to start?

Doris Tam: 20:54

Data collection, reflection, ownership.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:58

Thank you. And Evonne?

Evonne Cheung: 21:01

Learner-centred, reflective, collaborative.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:06

Thank you. What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities? Evonne?

Evonne Cheung: 21:15

Focus less on the final artefact and more on the reflection and the learning process behind it. Keep the experience simple and purposeful, much like the UI redesign, really [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:30

Yes, exactly[laughs]. Doris, do you have a tip for learning designers or instructors?

Doris Tam: 21:38

It's good to provide a framework, not a formula. Structure is important, but so is leaving room for people to find their own way to reflection journey because it's personal, they don't all look the same.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:54

Now, what advice do you have for the people who create portfolios, be that students or also professionals?

Doris Tam: 22:03

Don't wait until it's perfect to start. It's kind of like a garden where you put seeds in, they grow, and it might be a mess sometimes. You might need to tidy up, and growth never looks tidy on the inside, but it's beautiful.

Evonne Cheung: 22:17

Think of your portfolio as more than just a collection of work. It's a way to tell a story of your learning and your growth. Focus not only on what you create, but also why it mattered and what you've learned during the process because reflection is the part that gives a portfolio the most value.

Doris Tam: 22:55

I didn't realise how much of a struggle, but a fun struggle it was going to be working so closely with a BA and a designer because none of us had done anything at this scale before, and so we had to really learn to trust each other and let the other person work where their strengths are, and just trust that they know what they're doing, they'll do great, and then they'll pass it on to you, and then they'll trust you to do it. And so trust, ownership, and teamwork.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:26

Thank you so much for sharing a bit of the work that went into the redesign of Mahara, showing our community a bit more what went into it because of course, that is like good design, typically not seen because we are using the platform, and we expect it to work, and we expect it to look good, but what actually happens under the hood is often not so visible. Thank you so much for the chat today, Doris and Evonne, and thanks for being on the podcast. Now over to you. As you think about your own portfolio work, what do you value in a portfolio platform? Share your thoughts on LinkedIn, Bluesky, or Mastodon, and take me or send me an email. This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Doris Tam and Evonne Cheung. Make sure to check out the resources in your podcast app or at podcast.mahara.org. And if you found this valuable, share it with a colleague who'd appreciate it, too. Our next episode will air in two weeks. Until then, create, share, and engage.