While Sakai faces many challenges with respect to its user interface, the main problems that MooseTrout sees are:

• inconsistent navigation, especially relating to use of links, buttons, and icons
• inconsistent design paradigms; this will hopefully start to be solved with the design patterns work that some members of the community have started on
• lack of interface infrastrucuture for AJAX effects -- status areas on tool panes, clear delineation of tool real estate so that users know which portions of the page may auto-refresh, etc.

The skin that MooseTrout submitted for the Sakai 2.2 skin contest contained a few ideas that were meant to start addressing these concerns.

Specifically, desktop applications were used as models for determining how depth, colour, and shade could be used to offset the many parts of a Sakai page.