Our new homepage

After lots of design iterations, development work and usability testing, we’re pleased to say that the new version of our homepage is now live.

The homepage now uses the same new responsive design as the study and research areas of the site, so it’s optimised to work across a range of device sizes from small phone screens to large desktop monitors.

The homepage is optimised to work across a range of device sizes

As well as the change to how the page looks, we’ve also made changes to the content of the page and the navigation that surrounds it. This includes:

More links for internal audiences
We used data from Google Analytics to look at what staff and students were searching for when they visited the homepage. As a result we’ve added several links that haven’t been included on the homepage before, such as timetables and the library. These can all be found under the ‘Staff and students’ menu at the top of the page.

More content about campus and city life
In the previous design there were only four slots available to feature content in, which were also used to feature news and events, so campus and city life could only be included from time to time. This is very important content for prospective students, and we’ve put a lot of effort into revamping our student life content recently, so we decided to give it a dedicated space.

More links to factual content
Lots of visitors to our site just want to find answers to basic queries like when our term dates are, or how to get to campus, so we’ve added these too.

Behind the scenes, we’re using a new system that makes it easier for us to manage the content (Contentful, for those of you that are interested). We’ve also produced a content guide, to help us ensure that any everything we put up is on-brand and conveying the right message.

Updates to pages for current students

Just in time for the start of term, we've updated our pages for current students using the quick fix mobile-optimised redesign.

The pages now look smarter and are easier to use on the mobiles and tablets which account for over a third of their pageviews.

Old style

New style

Removal of personalised content

In addition to the design changes, we've also redeveloped the student homepage. Viewers of that page used to see just a large button inviting them to log in, but 80% didn't do so. We've removed that login option so that everyone gets straight to the news and content that they need.

Removing the login option does mean we've had to remove the personalised elements of the page for now, including timetable and library widgets. Usage data showed that these were very lightly used though so the cost of maintaining them didn't seem justified by the limited use.

Feedback

This has been a quick-turnaround project, so while it's a great step forward there may be room for more improvement. Comments are welcome here on the blog or through the feedback form on the web pages themselves.

Guerrilla usability testing at our open days

With thousands of potential students descending on campus for our open days last week, we had an ideal opportunity to get out ‘into the wild’ and carry out some guerrilla usability testing on the recently launched study at York pages, our new course pages, and a new homepage design that we’re working on

What’s different about guerrilla testing?

In guerrilla usability testing there isn’t a recruitment or screening process to find participants, you’re basically walking up to willing-looking strangers and asking if they’ve got a few minutes to spare. The tests can take place anywhere that you can find people - coffee shops, train stations, shopping centres, etc. Open days are ideal because everyone who comes to campus is going to be in our target demographic!

How we did it

Although guerrilla usability testing is a lot less formal than a lab-style usability test, we still used a script (cribbed from Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy) to make sure that our introductions covered the basics of who we were, what we were doing, how long it would take, and perhaps most importantly, that we would reward participants with chocolate.

Essential supplies for a bit of guerrilla website usability testing at #YorkOpenDay!

A photo posted by Paul Kelly (@itspaulkelly) on Jun 24, 2016 at 8:38am PDT

Before we got our participants to use the site, we asked them a few questions about the course they were hoping to study and what specific bits of information that they’d look for to help them decide if a course was right for them. We then asked them about other factors that would influence their decision to apply to a particular university. Based on their responses we came up with some scenarios on the fly.

What we tested

Over the course of the two open days we ran 17 tests, using both laptops and phones. Each test took around 10 minutes.

As well as course information, our participants looked for information on accommodation, the college system, the city, sport, societies and nightlife.

What we learned

• Everyone likes a Yorkie bar!
• Overall our participants were able to complete all the tasks that we gave them and liked the look of our redeveloped pages. 
• It was reassuring to see a lot of our assumptions validated, especially on our new course pages (eg BA Politics) - students found it easy to tell what they’d be studying each year, and really liked seeing authentic quotes from current students. 
• We got a lot of positive feedback about the in-progress new homepage design, with students liking how it looked, finding it “professional” and “welcoming”. One area that caused some confusion was the section on research, so we’ll be refining that further to make it clearer.
• We found a few small bugs to fix with how the site works on mobile. It’s on our roadmap to set up a device lab so that we’ll be able to catch things like this sooner.
• Several students used the main site search (rather than the course search) to find courses, which resulted in a much less direct path. There’s some work to be done to see how we can improve that.

We’ll definitely be doing this again. As well as the value of the testing itself, it’s always great to get out of the office and meet the users of our site.

Further reading

• The Art of Guerrilla Usability Testing Guerrilla testing - UX Booth
• Guerrilla testing - Government Service Design Manual

Responsive quick-fix: rollout updates

We're making good progress with departments who are keen to adopt our new responsive quick-fix designs.

In addition to the About the University pages, the new designs have been applied to Electronics, TFTV and the Humanities Research Centre, as well as Alcuin College, the Ron Cooke Hub and Campus Food and Bars.

This chart shows the growing scope of the quick-fix rollout project, the pages currently being checked and total number of pages with the new designs applied:


If you're interested in moving your departmental pages into a responsive layout then contact us at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk and get started.

Revamping our student life content

We've recently launched our brand new student life content for prospective students. The content hadn't been overhauled since 2011, so it was definitely due a refresh.

The aim of the new content is to show prospective students the fantastic experience on offer at York, not just on campus but also in our amazing city. We also want to illustrate that getting immersed in campus life isn't just about fun and meeting people - it's also about improving skills and employability. We're demonstrating these things with lots of examples of student activities, alongside student stories and rich imagery.

Amplifying the student voice is a key part of the project. We want to give the student perspective (which is of course what prospective students want) and we want to increase engagement with our student blogs - also new this recruitment cycle. So look out for student quotes and blog excerpts dotted throughout the content.

This is what the landing page looked like before the changes...

And here it is now...

As you can see we've got some graphical key facts about the University, an opening quote from Ben, the YUSU president; followed by image rich highlights of what's on offer. You can also see some of the latest student blogs posts and further down the page information about the various support mechanisms.

This is the new culture and entertainment page, which includes lots of compelling examples of what's on offer, backed up with the student view.

There are plenty more pages to look at, so feel free to peruse the new content at your leisure.

Not only have we completely refreshed the content, we've also used our shiny, new 'device friendly' templates. This means the content resizes dynamically for desktops, tablets and mobiles. This is part of an ongoing project which involves moving all our content for prospective students into the new design. Although I should say, it isn't as simple as just moving the content - the content has been reviewed, rewritten and restructured to give a better and more consistent user experience. So far we've redeveloped the undergraduate, postgraduate, accommodation and student life sections. At the moment we're working on the international students section.

As with all our content development projects it's been a collaborative process. We couldn't redevelop our content without the expertise and knowledge of our subject matter experts. For this project we've worked with our fantastic student intern Katie, who's been keeping us on track in terms of the student view. YUSU have also been involved in reviewing the content which has been a really valuable part of the process. And last but not least our colleagues in student support have also helped with checking content and providing information.

In terms of measuring success, our overarching goals are to increase engagement with the content and improve perceptions about York student life. So we've set various measurable goals to see if we achieve this. For example, we ran a survey with currents students about the old content and we're doing the same survey for the new content, so we can measure students' perceptions of the content. You can find out more on the Wiki page about the project.

If you have any student life content featured in your department pages, we would be grateful if you could replace it with a link to the new content.

Finally, if you have any feedback on the new content you can let us know at: digital-marketing@york.ac.uk or via the comments below.

Introducing the new University image library

We're pleased to introduce the new University image library, an online collection of 10,000+ photos of campus, the city and university life.

All staff can access the full collection of images and use pictures for a variety of print and online purposes. You can browse by category, search by keyword and even check picture locations on a map. As you find images you'd like to use, you can collect them in a 'lightbox' which you can collaborate on with colleagues. Once you've made your selection, you can download full-resolution copies.

Non-staff, including external users, can access a smaller collection of images available to all.

Get started at images.york.ac.uk and take a look at our user guide and tips to help you make the most of the system.

We'd welcome comments via our feedback form. If you've any questions you can get in touch as always at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk.

Using segments in Google Analytics to identify external users

As Google Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik frequently points out, "All data in aggregate is cr*p", and if you want to get anything useful out of it you need to segment it.

For us, a fairly simple-sounding bit of segmentation is to look at how external users use our site compared to our internal audience of staff and students.

Although we can segment quite easily based on whether a user was on campus or not, that doesn’t give us a completely clear picture, as staff and students both frequently access our site from off-campus. Students use it from private rented accommodation and when they’re away from York during vacations, and staff use the site from home and when travelling on university business too.

Our new approach is to try to infer whether someone is an internal user or not based on factors such as the content they look at and the things that they search for.

Our 'Probably an external user' segment

Some of the conditions used to identify external users

So to try to identify external users, we've got an advanced segment is set to exclude sessions that meet any of the following criteria:

We're the service provider

An easy one to start with - exclude any sessions where the service provider is University of York.

Looked at pages that only internal users can see

Another easy one: exclude any pages that are behind authentication, which users wouldn’t be able to access without logging in. For example, the Timetabling Gateway or Student Enquiry System.

Looked at pages that that are aimed at internal users

This one is less clear cut as we have a lot of internally focussed pages that are publicly accessible, so external users can end up viewing them, accidentally or otherwise. We also know that there are some cases where our information architecture isn’t quite right and we end up directing prospective students to information that’s in the current students branch.

But still, if someone looks at anything in www.york.ac.uk/staff and www.york.ac.uk/students then it’s a pretty good signal that they’re an internal users, so we exclude them. We’re also excluding any URLs that include the words intranet, internal or current-students (with some regular expressions to catch variants with and without hyphenation or an ‘s’ on the end).

Searched for things that internal users use 

Again, it’s not 100% clear cut, but if someone searches for one of our internal systems then it’s likely that they’re a student or member of staff.

So we exclude any sessions where the user searched for things such as VLE, Moodle, eVision, VPN, email or Planon.

Using the segment

Here's how our audience overview looks with this segment applied (the orange line) compared to all of our traffic (the blue line):

It's not perfect (but that's not the point), but you can see right away that usage patterns are different, with much less of a drop-off at the weekend for external users.

Further reading

• A Common Mistake You Make When Building Segments in Google Analytics

Responsive 'quick-fix' live

In February we unveiled our plans for a responsive 'quick-fix' for key web pages. Our aim was to improve user experience across a range of devices, while avoiding the laborious process of rebuilding thousands of pages.

We're pleased to announce that the first pages to use the new designs went live at the end of March.

The About the University pages are now more usable on phones and tablets. They also present a more coherent user journey alongside the newly rebuilt Study branch.

We've begun to roll out these new templates to departments. Many are well underway checking existing pages to make sure they translate cleanly into the new designs.

If you're interested in moving your departmental pages into a responsive layout then contact us at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk to get started. You can even book time in our (very grandly named) Device Lab, to help speed the process along!

More information on responsive designs:

• Introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website
• Preparing for and opting in to new responsive designs for CMS pages

Introducing Digital Drop-ins

As we mentioned before Christmas, we’re planning to run a monthly clinic for CMS users and departmental marketing folk to ask us anything about their digital marketing.

The first Digital Drop-in will be next Monday, 29th February from 10am to 12pm. It will take place in V/122, the seminar room on the first floor of Vanbrugh. You can use our fantastic room search to see where it is on a map and to get directions.

If you have a question about how to plan for the new responsive templates, how best to organise your content or your community of web contributors, or anything else that you’d just like a chat about, sign up for an appointment.

The Digital Drop-ins aren’t replacing our usual support channels, so if you need some help with content in the CMS, you can call x4127 or email digital-marketing@york.ac.uk.

We have limited space available next Monday, so if you’d like some advice, sign up now and book your spot.

Preparing for and opting in to new responsive designs for CMS pages

Before reading this post, hopefully you’ve been to the test site, toggled the responsive styles on, and had a look around. If not, see our accompanying post introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website.

If you create and maintain content on the university website you’ll hopefully want to know when we can put these styles live on your pages. This post describes what you and we need to do in order to do that.

Opting in

Departments and sections can opt in to adopt these new designs for their section of the site. There are a few criteria we need you to fulfill to be able to do this:

1. A commitment from you to check all the pages in your section of the site to ensure they display correctly (more details on this below). Note that we’re expecting to enable the new design at a root-section level rather than small sub-sections lower in the hierarchy (ie. all of a department’s pages will switch at once, not a few at a time).
• If it’s really impossible for you to do this checking, and this will be a blocker to you adopting the new design, let us know. We’ll try to help in as many cases as we can.
2. Understanding that, for now, the new design doesn’t include departmental colours. Options for colour will be re-introduced in the future, but we don’t have a timescale for that yet.
3. Ensuring you have the backing of your department to make the change and the authority to sign it off before going live. 

If you can meet those criteria and would like to get involved, get in touch at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk and we’ll add you to our list.

Testing your pages

Before we switch a section of the site to the new design, we’ll need you to check every page in that section and provide feedback on any issues you can see. We’ll provide tools and guidance to help you do this.

Once we kick off a project to switch your area of the site (but not yet - for now just have a look around and use the feedback tool to alert us to anything obvious that you spot), the kinds of things that you’ll need to check for on a page-by-page basis include:

• Does it look right?
  Ensure there isn’t any overlapping text, or strangely over- or undersize images. Check that the submenu is right and that your images are loading properly.
• Is it working?
  On many pages there are Twitter lists, scrolling banner images, tabs, accordion boxes or some other added functionality. Is this still working? Let us know if there is any unexpected or broken functionality.
• Does the content read properly?
  Part of the work we’ve done is to reorder the content slightly, in those cases where the content at the top of a column comes too far down the page. Scan through the content on the page and make sure it makes sense and is in the right order

We’re aware that some of you may be responsible for hundreds of pages in the CMS so this isn’t a trivial task. But if you split the site down into manageable chunks it’s possible to get it done in a relatively short time, and certainly much faster than rebuilding the pages in a new template. It’s also a good opportunity to make sure that the web pages you have are up-to-date, relevant and useful.

Next steps

If you’re interested in adopting the new design, here’s what should happen next:

1. Have a good look around your pages on the test server so you have a good understanding of what the change will look like.
2. Discuss the opportunity in your department and, if you need it, get the buy-in of your senior manager.
3. Let us know you’re interested and when you’d like to do the checking of your pages - email us at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk - and we’ll agree some dates to start on and aim to finish by.
4. You check your pages, give feedback on anything that’s broken and we either fix it or advise you on how to modify the content so that it works.
5. Once all pages are checked and signed off, we’ll apply the change to your live pages.

All of that might sound quite complex, but we think it should actually be fairly straightforward and we’re here to help. If you’d like to discuss it with us, feel free to call Dan on x2047, or look out for another blog post in the next few days about upcoming content clinics where you can come and chat in person.

Introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website

Five years ago the proportion of people visiting the university’s website on a mobile or tablet device was just 2%. It’s now over 25%. The need for our website to work better on a range of different devices is obvious.

One of our aims for this year is to update the current site to be responsive: that is, to fit to whatever screen it is displayed on whether that’s a mobile, tablet or computer. We blogged before Christmas about our plans for rolling out new responsive page templates and what we’re introducing today is part 3 of that plan - an incremental improvement to existing pages that can be applied to all CMS pages.

The new study pages, as they appear on different sized devices

We’ve developed new styles for existing CMS-published web pages which do two key things. First, they now work better on smaller devices. Second, they incorporate new fonts and colours to make for more cohesive user journey around the site. At this time we haven’t incorporated departmental colours, but options for colour will follow in the future.

Give us your feedback

We have a test version of the website at which you can preview the new design and send us your feedback. To access the test site, which is available on the University network only (including via the VPN if you’re off site), go to the page you are interested in on the main website and replace the www in the website address with cmsmigrate. So, for instance, if you want to try out www.york.ac.uk/about/ you would change the address in your browser to read cmsmigrate.york.ac.uk/about/.

Once you’re on the test site and looking at a CMS-published page that’s affected by the new designs, you’ll see a toggle switch in the top right-hand corner. Clicking it will turn on the new styles for you.



If you make your browser window narrower or wider you’ll see the layout adapt to the size of the window.



If you visit cmsmigrate.york.ac.uk on a mobile or tablet and turn the new styles on you’ll see that the content automatically adapts to the size of the screen.

Have a look around and let us know if you spot any issues by clicking the ‘Leave Feedback’ button in the bottom right-hand corner.' We’d really value your input.

What next?

We’re hoping to start rolling out these new designs very soon on an opt-in basis for the different sections of the site. If you’re involved in maintaining your department’s web pages, we have a separate blog post for you about preparing for, testing and activating the new designs.