Sprint notes - sprint 26

What we've been working on in our most recent two-week sprint.

Confirmation, Adjustment and Clearing

Tasha and Amanda worked with Student Recruitment and Admissions to provide a comprehensive list of vacancies for Adjustment and Clearing on A level results day, and to keep this up-to-date throughout the busy phase of Adjustment and Clearing. We also worked on social media to congratulate students confirming their place and to provide supportive messages from current students and alumni. 

Responsive design

Paul has been investigating ways to move the University website to a responsive design. At the Show and Tell Paul gave a presentation on what work this involves (internal only)  and a glimpse into the possible approaches we can take. 

Course pages

We're continuing to work with an external agency on the design and content of our course pages. After providing feedback on wireframes we've received a design proposal which we are considering and will send feedback on.  Alison gave a presentation on the background, and the progress so far, in the latest Show and Tell. 

Websites moving into the Web CMS

The Planning Office and Electronics have both started the process of migrating into the Web CMS. While moving the Planning Office pages we'll be looking at ensuring they sit in audience facing areas of our site: especially useful for users who are not familiar with the University's offices. There has also been a reorganisation with PRDU now sitting outside of the Politics website, helping to support the University's goal of increasing PRDU's inter-disciplinary activities. 

Setting up a regular email update

As part of our efforts to keep web authors informed of what's happening that might affect them, we've started a newsletter. Amanda will be sending out the first newsletter by the end of the week. 

Show and Tell

Don't forget you can come along to our regular  Show and Tell sessions to see quick presentations about what we've been up to lately and ask us questions. They're every fortnight on a Wednesday lunchtime and the next one is on 10 September.

Sprint notes - sprint 25

This is our second post in which we tell you about the things that we've been working on in our most recent two-week sprint.

Confirmation, Adjustment and Clearing

Tasha has been leading the team though a lot of work to improve our content for students who will be joining us after receiving their exam results. As well as work on our listings page of clearing vacancies, we've also developed new content to guide students through the confirmation process, and have worked on other supporting pages within the study site to ensure that we're presenting York in the best possible light. We've introduced a new undergraduate study landing page and have improved our content around careers and sport.

Search engine

We now have an instance of Google Custom Search Engine ready to use in case our primary search engine fails. 

York Researchers Night

Dan and Paul have been helping the Events team with the branding and launch of the website for the York Researchers Night which is coming up in September.

Course pages

We're continuing to work with an external agency on the design and content of our course pages. We've provided feedback on the first set of wireframes and will continue to work closely with them through the design phase.

Accommodation applications system

Dan has been continuing to work with IT Services and Accommodation on the design and user experience of the new system that students will use to book their accommodation.

Video captioning

Following on from a request from the Disability and Accessibility group, Paul has been looking at firming up our policy on video captions on our YouTube channel. Although a lot of our videos were already captioned, it wasn't being done as a matter of course. We've decided that from now on, everything that goes on our YouTube channel will be captioned, and we've been looking at the captioning services available that will let us do this most efficiently. See our notes on publishing video for details, along with other things to bear in mind when using YouTube.

Festival of Ideas analytics reports

Tom has worked on the analysis of the stats from this year's Festival of Ideas. We tracked a lot more data this time and made use of goals in Google Analytics so we have some good insights into what worked best when it came to getting people to actually register for events.

Show and Tell

Don't forget you can come along to our regular Show and Tell sessions to see quick presentations about what we've been up to lately and ask us questions. They're every fortnight on a Wednesday lunchtime and the next one is on 27 August.

New team member - Christine Comrie

Hello!  I’ve recently joined the team as Digital Editor for Students.  It’s my job to improve the ‘digital experience’ for students whilst they’re at York - so that means I’ll be making sure all information students need whilst they’re studying with us can be easily found online and that it looks pretty.

I’ve crossed the border from the University of Leeds, where I was Information Officer for the Jisc Regional Support Centre based there.  Hopefully, I’ll be putting some of the work done by Jisc on the ‘digital student’ into practice.

I’m looking forward to meeting colleagues and getting your ideas on the kinds of improvements we can make.  Please do get in touch!

Christine

Show and Tell, Wed 13 August 2014

Just a very quick reminder that we'll be running our second Show and Tell session tomorrow lunchtime (1pm, D/L/036) and we'd love to see you there.

In case you missed it last time, Show and Tell is a new fortnightly meeting run by the Digital team where we give snappy 5-minute presentations on recent projects or topics of interest.

Coming up tomorrow, we have presentations about:

• Using personas
• Building and measuring the success of the Festival of Ideas website
• Social media at Graduation
• The perils of Analytics

Details and automated alerts about upcoming events are available to staff and students via our Show and Tell wiki page.

Digital screening - Experiencing Delightful Content by Jared Spool

As mentioned in last week's sprint notes, we're starting up a programme of screenings of recorded conference presentations or virtual seminars on topics related to all things digital.

Our first screening will be Wednesday 6 August at 1pm in H/G17 (that's tomorrow lunchtime - sorry for the short notice!) For our first event we've picked Jared Spool talking about Experiencing Delightful Content, recorded at the UX Immersion conference last year. A summary of the talk is available on the conference site.

These screenings will run every two weeks on a Wednesday lunchtime and are open to anyone in the University who would like to join us. Full details are on the digital screenings wiki page (uni folk only) and if you watch the wiki page (Tools > Watch) you can get automatic email updates when we announce future topics.

Hope to see a few people tomorrow and at future screenings.