Google Maps comes to campus (ish)

A few days ago, we noticed that where there had previously been a complete void, Google Maps now includes coverage of the university campus:


View Larger Map

Well, sort of anyway. There are a few big omissions, most notably that the whole of the Heslington East campus development is missing. Also absent are footpaths, so directions aren't much use unless you fancy taking a very leisurely stroll.

Promising stuff though, hopefully the data will improve over time.

A year in the life of the Unviersity of York homepage

The current incarnation of the University of York homepage was launched this time last year, just in time for Christmas in December 2010.

Here's a look at how it has changed over the last year.

Signing up for Google Apps - a look behind the scenes

Posted on our Enhancing the University of York's student website blog:

• Signing up for Google Apps - a look behind the scenes

Launch of You@York, the University's applicant portal

On 31st October York launched its applicant portal, You@York. The portal is for post-offer undergraduate applicants and is aimed at persuading them to accept their offer of a place.

This is a large and complex project with involvement from staff across the University: Admissions, Student Recruitment, the Student Systems Development Team, the Web team, the Planning Office, IT Services, the E-learning Development Team, Student Support Services and others.

Applicants are sent a username and password along with their offer letter. When an applicant logs in, it recognises who they are and displays some information that is personalised. The navigation bar contains SSO links to sections in e:Vision where they can manage their personal details, book a visit and apply for a Tier 4 Visa certificate. The look and feel is the same in e:Vision and the website, so the user experience isn't interrupted either by a logon screen or by different interfaces.



The applicant name is pulled in using ColdFusion, while departmental content is pulled in from a custom database. The Careers section also presents some information related to the applicant's department - a graduate profile, destinations link and a careers adviser name and contact details - which is pulled in from a Careers database.Because the VLE doesn't work with Shibboleth yet, and we didn't want to make applicants log on a second time, it wasn't possible to provide applicant-only content in the VLE for launch. So the three modules in the VLE (Money matters, and introduction to the Colleges and an introduction to Academic integrity) are all open-access, but only linked through You@York.

The next phase of the project involves researching what applicants need from their department. This will inform the development of departmental VLE modules for applicants. Alongside this we will be reviewing postgraduate transition sites to see what is the best way of providing this information for postgraduate applicants, and launching a postgraduate version of You@York in October 2012.

• More about You@York for applicants
• More information for staff about You@York and the applicant portal project

Job opportunity - come and join us!

Web Projects Assistant: (Ref: 2052)

The University is in the midst of a major redevelopment of its website, including migration to a web content management system and development of numerous supporting web applications.

One important strand of this work is the development of a completely revised student-facing website. The enhanced student site will provide personalised news, alerts and links to relevant content in addition to a full range of information to support students throughout their University lives. A one year temporary post has been created which offers exciting opportunities to play a key role in this ambitious project.

The purpose of this role is to provide support to team members working on the student website and other projects. This will involve working closely with the team and colleagues in the Web Office on iterative design, implementation and assessment of web-based products and working with internal customers to support their web-based activities.

We are looking for someone with experience of producing high quality, professional and engaging websites. You should have the ability to write and edit high quality web content and a solid understanding of HTML, CSS and basic JavaScript.

Excellent communication skills and a keen interest in the web are a must.

Salary within the range: £22,971 - £28,251 per annum.

Closing date for applications: Monday 24 October 2011.

Further information is available via http://www.york.ac.uk/jobs/

Enhancing our website for current students

We've been busy over the last couple of months working on improving our website for our current students, which we're planning to launch at the start of October.

The existing site for current students

The enhancements are going to make the site more personalised and dynamic, giving students quicker and easier access to the content and systems they need, and will have a distinct design to set it apart from the University's external facing web content.

You may have heard this being referred to as the Portal project - we're trying to avoid using the "P" word though, as there are already a lot of other portals around the University.

We've set up a dedicated blog about the project, where we've been posting updates and background info. We've just posted an August 2011 progress update, so you can see how things are shaping up.

100,000+ content items in the Web CMS

Sometime at the end of last week we reached quite a milestone in our rollout of TerminalFour's Site Manager web CMS - 100,000 approved content items are now managed in the system.

We average around 3 content items per page, so our 100,000 content items are generating roughly 30,000 pages.

Growth of content in the system

We started rollout of the CMS at around the beginning of 2009 and the chart below shows the growth in the number of content items in the system since then.

There was good steady growth in the number of content items held in Site Manager for the first year of implementation, followed by a sharp increase in the growth rate from the start of 2010 when we added three web CMS migration assistants to our team.

Onwards and upwards?

We're still working on lots of migrations and new sites in the CMS so for the forseeable future this chart will keep trending quite steeply upwards. Eventually I expect the growth will slow, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm posting about having reached 200,000 content items 18 months from now.

Social media and graduation

The University's class of 2011 graduated over three days of ceremonies on campus just over a month ago.

For the first time, we made just a tiny effort to coordinate some social media activity around the event. The media would have us believe that everyone and their dog are using Twitter and such like to document their every move, so a big day like graduation would surely be all over social media. Wouldn't it?

What we did

We actually did very little to encourage or promote the use of social media. We did kick around ideas such as asking Greg Dyke, Chancellor of the University, to ask the ceremony audience to take photos and submit them, but we didn't want to run before we walked! So in the end, we just did the following:

• Posted a few tweets on the University's @uniofyork account announcing the official hashtag, #UoYGraduation
• Posted a message encouraging sharing on Facebook and mentioning the hashtag
• Added the hashtag to our digital signage displays around campus

Did anything happen?

There were 50 or so tweets featuring the hashtag, quite a number of which were retweets and a number of those were from other University accounts (see an archive on the #UoYGraduation TwapperKeeper record). We also kept a look out for @uniofyork mentions and combinations of keywords including york, university, graduation and graduate. Here there were quite a few more graduation-related updates, but still only in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

Intriguingly, there were mentions of lots of photos being online, but very few surfaced publicly so I suspect these all reside in private albums on Facebook. A few photos and a couple of videos have shown up on Flickr and YouTube respectively, but that's all.

Was it worth it?

I think it was worth a try. It was all very last-minute and we really didn't do very much to get the word out, so our expectations weren't particularly high but nor did it take much of our time. What was a bit of a surprise was the relative lack of unprompted activity. For all the media hype, it seems our recent graduates and their families are mostly not keen Twitter-ers.

Graduation on Storify.com

Despite the relatively low volume of activity, I stitched together a Storify.com story of the day which I think is actually quite neat. Check out the University of York Graduation 2011 on Storify to see for yourself.

New English and Related Literature site goes live

The redeveloped Department of English and Related Literature site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

Before:

After:

IWMW and sharing what we're up to

I was away for a few days last week at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011 conference (IWMW) , where lots of like-minded web folk from universities around the country get together to share experiences and ideas.



As ever, there were some interesting presentations and workshops (videos are online) but the stand-out benefit of attending was once again the conversations with colleagues at other universities that happen between sessions and in the bar in the evening. Of course, being an annual conference means there can be a lot to catch up on, so it was great to see a couple of outcomes this year which should help keep us in touch more regularly.

Regional meetups

There was a resurgence of interest this year in resurrecting some of the local web meetups that have happened in the past but, with the exception of the Scottish web folk, seem to have largely fizzled out. Between a few of us University folk in Yorkshire, we're hopeful that we might manage a local get together before too long.

A higher-ed blog aggregator

Since getting together in person is always going to be a once-in-a-while activity, the surprise unveiling of an institutional web teams blog aggregator was great to see. It should help all of us discover what one another are up to on an ongoing basis.

I've probably got RSS feeds for most HE web teams pouring into Google Reader already, but this makes them much more visible, saves me having to discover new blogs myself (I can use a single feed from here to pick up everything) and adds a handy search feature.

Hopefully the increased visibility will inspire both us and others to post more frequently!

Emotional intelligence and the student portal

Part of the first phase of requirements gathering for the student portal involved focus groups with students. We wanted to identify what students used most frequently on the website and what they found hard or easy, in order to identify and prioritise the functionality developed for the portal.

One of the exercises we did in the student focus groups was based on some research by Paul Adams, lately of the Google user experience team and now of Facebook, published in a Slideshare presentation called The real life social network.

Paul found from his research that in 'real life', most people are careful to distinguish the information they share with different groups of people - this is considered a normal social skill. (See slides 53-84 for a fuller explanation. It is clear how much this research has influenced the development of Google Plus.)

Yet online, one of the usability issues with Facebook (for example) is that users end up with one huge list of 'friends' and no way of easily targeting status updates or other posts so you share different content with real friends than with family, work colleagues or housemates.

We wanted to see if this also applied to the type of channel that people chose to communicate with, so when we ran this exercise with students, we also asked them to identify the methods they used to communicate with each group. Although the student portal is a different type of application to Google Plus or Facebook, in that it is not primarily a social network for connecting with people, we found a fairly consistent set of preferences emerged for the channels people wanted to use in their role as a student. These results were reinforced in the student survey, with a much larger response rate of 2300.

Users expressed a strong preference to keep Facebook for communications on a social level, eg with friends or housemates, and to use University channels such as the VLE for communication with teaching staff and their department. This makes sense: most people don't communicate in the same way - or with the same group of people - on a dating website as they might on LinkedIn or the VLE; the people who do really stand out.

Of the top ten pieces of content / functionality that students wanted to to be available in the student portal, the tenth was access to social networking.

But giving students access to social networking tools or features, such as a 'like' button on an event which might show how many of their Facebook friends are attending, is a different thing from providing content on Facebook or Twitter. The objections to this are less that the University is not cool, than that the University has a formal relationship with students and it is 'socially inept' to use personal or social spaces for formal communication.

These findings have implications both for the content of the student portal and the University's work in social networking sites, one of the key points being that the channel you use is as important as the way you communicate.

A new online community for alumni and friends

On Friday last week we were proud to at last launch YorkSpace.net, the University's new online home for alumni and friends.

It's been a long road to launch, but we're pleased with the end product. Features include:

- A searchable alumni directory to find old class- and college-mates

- Online updating of your alumni record and newsletter subscriptions

- Details and signup for regional, global and profession-specific alumni networks

- Event registration for public lectures and alumni events

- Online donations

- Lots more - sign up and take a look!

Building the site

The team in Development and Alumni Relations deserve all the credit for the content and putting in the graft to make the site happen. It's been a huge effort getting it all ready and they've done a great job under considerable pressure.

I've been involved in a technical/design/user experience capacity so I've been figuring out some of the 'how does it work' (or, in more cases than we would have liked, if it works at all) type of jobs, but also bothering the Alumni team with my obsession with content inventory spreadsheets and pernickety details like changing 'click here' and 'contact us' email links.

Adventures in Analytics

One of the really interesting aspects of deploying YorkSpace.net for me is implementing Google Analytics for it.

We have a massive GA profile for the main University site, but we don't manage many goals or any ecommerce transactions on that site. YorkSpace.net is giving me chance to learn a few new things about Google Analytics and hopefully to find new ways to improve the site as it develops. A future post on the details may follow if I can ever get the darned ecommerce transactions to track properly...

Notes from the Design It. Build It. web conference

Last week I went up to Gateshead for Design It. Build It, a two-track web conference for designers and developers.

It was a great day, and I came a way with a lot to think about.  Here are my notes:

The Mechanical Revolution
Inayaili de Leon

• Designers can be resistant to letting technology do work for them - we often believe that hand-crafted CSS is superior to anything that can be automatically generated.
• There are parallels to the industrial revolution, when repetitive tasks were automated by machines. Some things then became so complex that they could no longer be made by hand. 
• This didn't eliminate the need for skilled craftspeople - they're still needed to design the products in the first place and innovate on them.
• Tools like CSS frameworks and preprocessors (eg LESS and Sass) can allow designers to become a lot more efficient. Instead of spending time on repetitive tasks, they can use this time to learn about user psychology, business skills, etc
• Using a framework doesn't have to mean using a generic one developed by someone else ( eg 960 or YUI). You can develop your own framework that matches your own needs.

Designing for Humans
Mike Kus

• The web is full of duplication - there are only a handful of different design styles, and everyone copies each other.
• Vodaphone and Coca Cola's corporate sites are interchangeable (and not just because they use the same colours), despite them being completely different brands.
• People form opinions based on a design, just like we form an opinion about someone based on their clothes or hairstyle.
• Randomly applying gradients and rounded corners ≠ design. Everything should be there for a reason.
• The online experience has to match the offline experience. 
• Apple understand this - they create beautiful products and their website reflects it. 
• On the other hand, Starbucks have a very strong and consistent brand in their stores, but their website looks like it could belong to anyone - if you removed their logo, you wouldn't know it was Starbucks.
• Mike took us through a "realignment" of the Innocent Smoothies homepage - another company with really strong and easily identifiable brand, but a very generic website:

Realigning Innocent from Mike Kus on Vimeo.


Designing to Where The Web Will Be
Faruk Ates

• If there's a web technology that you want to be using tomorrow, you need to start using it today.
• Browsers, platforms, smartphones, etc will only get more capable, not less.
• We shouldn't care what the latest browser is - we should be designing for browsers that don't even exist yet.
• Javascript libraries like Modernizr allow you to detect what features a browser supports (whether that's advanced CSS3 properties or HTML5 features) without designing for or detecting a particular browser.

Visualising Data

Brian Suda

• Every chart or graphic tells a story, and should only tell one story.
• The same data presented in a different way can tell a completely different story
• 3D doesn't add anything to our understanding of a graph - but making a pie chart 3D means that one edge of it will now be closer to you, and will look larger than an equally sized edge that is further away. 
• Everything in a chart that isn't conveying information is detracting from the parts that are. The ideal ratio of data to ink is 1:1. 
• Data is the main character, the grid lines etc are supporting actors.
• The absence of ink is just as telling as a strong line.
• "Chart junk" can sometimes help as a visual aid.
• Web designers [should] have always considered users with visual problems or old hardware. We've now got cutting edge technology that is black and white - the Kindle.
• Tools like SVG are great for quick data visualisation experiments - you can make it look nicer in Illustrator later.

DIBI Conference: Visualising Data

View more presentations from briansuda

One Web
Jeremy Keith

• We've never known how our sites would be experienced in real life. With the advent of mobile, tablets and every other internet-connected device, we REALLY don't know how it will be experienced.
• The same unknowns as ever - speed, capability, size - but we're paying attention to them now
• WYSIWTF
• There should be one web. Not a desktop web and a mobile web (and a tablet web, and an internet-enabled fridge web).
• Responsive design isn't just applying CSS media queries.
• Start with the content and work outwards, not from the layout inwards. 
• Context isn't the same as what device someone is using. Just because someone is using an iPhone to view your site it doesn't mean that they're rushing down the street at the same time - they could be sat at home. So don't force a cut-down version of your site on them.
• People use tools like Instapaper and Readability to get rid of the rubbish that fill the screen with. We shouldn't put it there in the first place.
• Native apps or web apps? Native apps are like CD-ROMS - they'll get neglected and eventually stop working. If content is on the web, it has a much longer shelf-life.

What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive
Jared Spool

The perfect antidote to the potential post-lunch tiredness, Jared Spool certainly knows how to liven things up. If you ever get a chance to see him speak, make sure you snap it up.

• A design is unintuitive when a user has to think about the mechanics of the design (where to click, how to scroll) rather than the task they're trying to accomplish.
• Intuitive design is invisible. We only notice it when it's not working properly. 
• Intuitive design is personal.We know who we are designing for, what their past knowledge is and what words they understand.
• In every system (website, software, etc) there's a gap between the user's current knowledge and the target knowledge they need to use the system. This gap is where design happens. Intuitive design brings the user's knowledge to the level they need.
• You can reduce the target knowledge by simplifying. If you don't simplify your own product, your competitors will.
• Things become intuitive over time - we know where everything is in our own kitchen cupboards.
• Regular users of a site can lose their current knowledge if we decide to redesign a site from scratch. Can alleviate this with labels to highlight new menu items, callouts that explain what a new piece of functionality is, explanatory text about why things have changed, etc.
• Five second tests can highlight whether people "get" your design. Show it to them for five seconds and see what they remember. 

What Every Web Designer Should Know

Jeffery Zeldman

• We're not in control of the visual experience. We never were.
• Tools like Instapaper and Readability liberate content.
• Design that doesn't serve people does not serve business.
• Design without knowing about content is just decoration. The first set of blogger templates were designed by talented designers, but they don't work because they were designed without regard for content, so they're used inappropriately. The only template that has stood the test of time is the most simple and neutral one - it can work with anything.
• You must test with users - but usability testing can be a crutch when what you want to do is change behaviours and patterns.
• Learn new skills - designers need to know about content strategy just as much as they need to know about the latest CSS tricks.
• Mobile means more than just "it works on a small screen".
• Pave the cowpaths. Find out what users are doing already and make it better.

Back to basics: No surprises please - links should do what users expect

Following on from the first ‘back to basics’ post about why you shouldn't use ‘click here’ as link text, I’m sticking with the link text theme.

This time, the thing to remember is that what happens when a user clicks a link should never be a surprise to them. Users expect links to lead to other web pages. If your link leads to something else and the link text doesn’t say so, that’s going to be a nasty surprise for the user.

We often create links to email addresses. These should include the email address in the link text because this gives a big clue about what the link is to. Instead of writing ‘To find out more, contact us’ and linking to an email address, try ‘To find out more, contact us at name@address.com’. You might reasonably expect the former to link to a contact form, but there will be no surprises what the latter one does.

Links to files such as Word, Excel, PDF or MP3 can also be unpleasant surprises, especially if they are large downloads. A user might not have the correct program to open the file, or they might prefer to not download a hefty PDF and start up Acrobat Reader if they can avoid it. Instead of writing ‘find out more about our module in widgets’, try ‘find out more about our module in widgets (PDF, 700kb)’. No surprises.
PS. If you’re using the University CMS, you get this one for free - the system labels your links for you :)

New windows are another common surprise for users. If you feel you absolutely must open a new window (even though usually I would advise that you don’t), it’s much better to say so: ‘see this other website (opens in a new window)’. Pop-ups can be frustrating and confusing for users, but they’re much less so if they know what’s going to happen before they click the link.

So, whenever you create a link always ask yourself ‘What would a user expect this link to do?’ and make sure you’ve crafted it to avoid surprises.

Google dropping support for Internet Explorer 7

Yesterday, Google announced their plans to stop supporting older browsers. From 1 August 2011, only the current and previous versions of the main browsers will be guaranteed to work with Google's suite of web applications (which for a lot of people primarily means Google Mail).

For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

With Internet Explorer now up to version 9, this means that they will no longer support version 7 (not too surprising, given that it's nearly 5 years old).

Looking at our own stats for the University of York website, last month we saw IE7 account for 5.7% of our traffic, with ten-year-old IE6 still hanging on in there with 2.7% of our visits.

With Microsoft also behind a campaign to move the world off Internet Explorer 6, things are looking promising for getting people to move over to much more modern browsers.

Back to basics - don't "click here"

A simple tip for the start of a new occasional series of ‘back to basics’ posts: Don’t use ‘click here’ as link text in your web pages. Ever.

This may be old news to seasoned web authors reading, but it’s one of the most common mistakes we see on the University website. Fixing it is one of the easiest ways to improve your web content.

A good summary of why ‘click here’ is bad circulated on Twitter a few weeks ago. I’ll not repeat the reasoning here, but definitely encourage you to read that article. It even quotes Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, who encouraged good linking right from the birth of the web.

‘Read more’, ‘more details’ or just ‘more...’ are bad too, for similar reasons. Use descriptive, scannable links instead and you’ll have made a huge improvement to your web content for very little effort indeed.

More back to basics tips coming soon...

Careers Service goes live

The Careers Service has launched new pages in the Web CMS.

The pages are split into two sections:

• the Office page (containing a staff list, details of the service and information for alumni, staff and employers)
  


• a large section called Work, volunteering and career planning on the student pages

The content has been completely restructured and tested with students to give an easy to use, student friendly feel.

Social Policy and Social Work goes live

New pages for the Department of Social Policy and Social Work are now live in the Web CMS.

Although the old site was pretty good, the new site uses the CMS automated news and events feature, much easier to view and display events, and a wider range of page layouts.

New sites for prospective undergraduates, postgraduates and international students

Yesterday, we launched our new student recruitment websites, for undergraduate, postgraduate and international students.

Before:

After:

What's changed?

More obvious next steps and calls to action

In the old design, key tasks like booking on an open day or ordering a printed prospectus were a bit buried in long and complicated menus. We've hopefully made it a lot more obvious how to complete these essential tasks.

Quicker and clearer paths to course information

Our research showed us that a lot of people were having trouble finding out if we even offered the course that they wanted to study. 

On the old site, you'd have to go through roughly the following process to find a course:

Finding a course on the old site

The problem wasn't only the number of steps involved, but also the fact that you're thrown off the scent when you go from the programme listing to a departmental homepage, and then have to navigate through a departmental website to find the course again.

On the new site, you can now search straight from the undergraduate homepage, by course title, keywords or UCAS code. The search results will take you directly to course information on departmental sites, rather than homepages.

Content about the city of York

One of the big attractions of coming to study at York is the fact that you get to live in a rather nice historic city, that's also got plenty going on. Our old site didn't really reflect this at all, so we've expanded on the images and content we have about the city, working in partnership with Visit York.


New colours

The colours used on the web now match the colours used in the printed prospectus, so the two now look a lot more related to each other.

Videos

The set of official videos are now a lot more visible in high profile spots around the site. In places we've also linked through to video content created by the Students' Union. In future phases we hope to expand on the amount of student-generated content we have on the site.

More to come

That's just a taster of some of the new content. There's a lot more besides, and more planned for future phases. We'll continue to work with colleagues in Student Recruitment and Admissions on expanding and improving on the site over the coming months.

Rolling up the homepage, Katamari-style

Ever wanted to completely destroy the University homepage? Of course you haven't! But now you can if you like, just for fun, Katamari-style.

Tech blog Engadget has a story about a genius bookmarklet that transforms any web page into a rollable Katamari landscape. If you've never heard of Katamari Damacy, it's a Japanese video game with a plot too bonkers to describe but which involves rolling up ever larger objects in the manner of rolling a snowball (see youtube for visuals). This bookmarklet lets you do likewise to a web page, and even features the same jaunty music as the game.

How is this relevant to a Web Office blog? Hardly at all, but it's fun :) On the technical side, it's a very powerful demonstration of what can be done with Javascript and advanced CSS transforms in a modern browser.

Check out the video below of me having a go, or see the Engadget link for the code to try it yourself (you'll need a decent browser - Chrome or Firefox4 are recommended by the developers).

Two years and 25000 web pages

It’s been a slow start to the blogging year in the Web Office, but I’m happy to belatedly start the ball rolling for 2011 with a quick update on what we've been up to recently.

It’s now two years since the first Web CMS-published website went live, and six months since my previous round-up post. Quite a few more sites have gone live in that time:

• Centre for Immunology and Infection (September 2010)
  
• The Borthwick Institute for Archives (September 2010)
• Department of Language and Linguistics (September 2010)
  
• Campus Development (October 2010)
  
• Humanities Research Centre (October 2010)
  
• Department of Biology (October 2010)
  
• Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (October 2010)
  
• Graduation (October 2010)
  
• Community pages in the About the University site (November 2010)
  
• Department of Sociology (November 2010)
  
• Creative Technology Centre (November 2010)
  
• The Ron Cooke Hub (November 2010)
  
• Department of Theatre, Film and Television (November 2010)
  
• Department of Politics (December 2010)
  
• Department of History of Art (February 2011)

Quick stats

The amount of content now being published by the CMS is vast: over 25000 web pages and almost double that number of related files. That’s over 7Gb of data, published by more than 500 people who have been trained to use the system.

Coming up

There’s more still to come too, including in the near future:

• A complete revamp of student recruitment sites
• Lots of staff- and student-facing content from the Academic Registry
• New pages from the Accommodation Office
• New Finance Department pages

Other projects

I should add that I had virtually nothing to do with any of the sites above and almost all the credit belongs with other folk in the Web Office team. I’ve been kept busy with a few other things, including:

• developing a public-facing view of Pure, the University’s new research database
• building an online community site for alumni and friends of the University
• bringing a CMS-perspective to plans for an integrated digital signage system for campus

Despite the slow start to the year on the blog, there are hopefully more posts to come and I’ll cover these projects in more detail in future posts.