Rebooting the campus map

We launched the first version of the interactive campus map back in 2012, and though we’ve made lots of improvements to it over the years, we felt it was time to give it a complete overhaul.

The new map

You can view the new map at www.york.ac.uk/map

We’ve introduced a number of new features, including:

Larger map

The map is now the full width of the screen. When you open the map, it’s focused on Campus East and Campus West. You can drag the map to move it around, or use the buttons on the right to centre in on Campus East, Campus West or King’s Manor.

The new map

Navigation by search and buttons

Whereas before you could only search for room codes, the new search allows you to find a range of locations, including buildings, departments and rooms, and facilities such as baby changing and car parks. Start typing a location, and then select from the dropdown list of closest matches.

Across the bottom of the screen are buttons for facilities, allowing you to see car parks, cafes, post boxes and so on at a glance. The buttons let you view more than one location at the same time. So, for example, you can search for a building and then locate the car parks that are nearby. You can also have multiple buttons selected at once, should you wish to view shops and cash machines at the same time.

We chose the button types by asking 25 volunteers to pick the facilities that they’d most like to see feature prominently on the campus map. We also took into account that some important facilities may not feature highly, such as baby changing facilities and prayer rooms, and we made sure they can be found via the search instead.

One area we were particularly keen to improve was car parking. All car parks are now displayed on the map, rather than just pay & display and short stay, and we’ve added in additional information such as number of spaces, and RingGo location numbers.

Mobile friendly

Mobile view

The new map has been designed to work on tablets and phones, making it easier to find the places you need when you’re out and about.

You’ll notice you can still access the facilities buttons, but they’re hidden at the bottom of the screen until you need them.

Future improvements

There are still a number of areas that we’re keen to work on:

• Walking and cycling directions between two points on the map
• Expanding the transport information to include bike racks, bike pumps, and perhaps live bus data
• At the moment, the room locations include directions to the room, but we’re only able to drop the pin on the building, rather than the exact location. We’re keen to be able to include more detailed room data using the precise coordinates.

Please take a look at the map, and feel free to leave any feedback either here, or using the feedback button on the map.

Updating the campus map

The interactive campus map was launched a couple of years ago, and one of the first things I was assigned to do was to update it a little bit. In particular, we wanted to be able to deep link to individual points the map and to have more information about a site pop up when you click on the markers.

Deep linking will make it easier for locations around campus to link to the map with their location highlighted. It's been requested from a few places so I'm happy to say it's now in place. When you click on an individual building you'll see that the URL in the address bar updates with a hash reference at the end (the "#heslington-hall" bit in https://www.york.ac.uk/about/maps/campus/#heslington-hall). Going directly to that URL will open the map zoomed in with a marker dropped in that particular spot.

The information pop-ups currently display the name of the location, which is handy when you're looking at all the cafes around campus and need to know which one you're looking at! We're getting some ideas about what other information would be useful to include in the pop-up. If you've got any ideas, let us know in the comments below.

We've got lots more plans for the map, including a location search and room search to make it even more useful for students, visitors and staff. Watch this space over the next few weeks!

Embiggening the campus map

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a small addition to the online campus map: you can now switch the map to full screen mode, allowing you to see a lot more of the campus at once.

Hopefully this will make it easier to navigate around our ever-expanding campus.

We know that there's still a lot of other functionality that you'd all like added to the map - like being able to search for rooms and buildings - we're hoping to work on some more of these kinds of features in our upcoming sprints, so stay tuned.

New homepage and design: reflecting on the work so far

Having launched the new homepage and design for core pages of the website a few weeks ago, we held a team retrospective to reflect on the process and outcomes of the work so far. This helps us build on the things that went well and refine our process for the future. Below are the four categories of our retrospective and selected highlights from our thinking.

High points

1. It actually happened!
   It's been a long time coming, so we're really happy to finally launch something new.
2. Having a comprehensive preview available on a test server
   From early on in the process we were publishing the work-in-progress homepage and new design for core page on a test server. This made it so much easier to discuss the changes with the wide range of stakeholders who were involved.
3. Trying some new tools
   We used Usabilla and CrazyEgg in anger for the first time with this project. Both proved really useful, the former for gathering up useful feedback before launch and the latter for visualising usage of the new homepage in a really compelling way.

Things that went well

1. CMS implementation
   Despite its faults, and we know that lately a lot of you have been feeling the pain of slow previews and unreliable publishes (previews should be better now; publishes should get better later this week), the way we'd implemented the original design in Site Manager made it relatively easy to switch to a new look.
2. Developing a process to manage the homepage
   In conjunction with redesigning the homepage, we've redesigned the process by which features and promotions are added to that page. York staff can find information about how we manage promotions on the homepage on the wiki.

Room for improvement

1. Too many things, too little time
   The biggest challenge, by far, was finding time to do the work. We're a very small team of just four people: one manager, one full-time on training and support, two of us trying to do project work but constantly pulled in different directions (eg. CMS preview and publish issues, unplanned project requests). We reckon we get to spend, at best, the equivalent of 1 FTE on planned project work. Given that the recent redesign is just one of several projects ongoing, it's easy to see why we struggle to make quick progress.
2. Finishing what we start
   We sometimes found that we'd start some aspect of the work with gusto, but then other things would come up (see point above) and we might not quite finish what we'd started.

New ideas

1. Reporting on where our time goes
   There are no easy fixes to the problem of just having way too many things to do, but we think a good start might be to reflect on exactly where time is being spent. We track a lot of our time already (using the excellent Tick time tracker) and we track our support calls too, so we have data. We're going to trial having monthly reviews of exactly what we spent time on and hopefully identifying actions we can take to make more time for the most important projects.

What we’ve been up to, Spring 2013

Oftentimes it’s hard to know what other teams are working on and easy to miss interesting developments that get released without a big launch. With that in mind, we thought an occasional series of updates about things we’ve been working on might be of interest.

Festival of Ideas

One of the biggest things we worked on throughout May was the 2013 Festival of Ideas website, including listings and ticket bookings (via EventBrite) for over 150 events.

 

History of the University - a timeline

Built as part of our 50th Anniversary site, our interactive timeline of the University’s history features well over 100 entries, with videos and imagery to help tell the story.

Food and drink on the web

We’ve started a project working with Commercial Services to move catering and bars information into the Web CMS. There’s not much to see just yet, but work is underway to create a dedicated section of the website for catering and drinking outlets on campus, which should be coming soon.

Updating the campus map

The campus map page now has more location pins available, including a dedicated section for venues being used for Festival of Ideas events, in order to help those who may not be familiar with the University to find their way around.

Also pretty cool, but not one we can take the credit for (that belongs with IT Services and Estates), is internal mapping of campus buildings starting to roll out on Google Maps. If you zoom in close, internal mapping information for most buildings on campus is starting to appear. It’s early days, for both us and Google (they’re using us as a pilot for universities in the UK), so we’re not shouting about it yet but this should be really handy once everything’s in place.

York Research Database and the University search engine

We launched the York Research Database back in February, but it took us another couple of months to test and integrate results into our main University search engine, but they’re there now. The big challenge was not indexing too many pages - the research database contains such a vast amount of data that indexing all of it would have overwhelmed the search engine.

Foursquare

We’ve done a small piece of work to establish ourselves on Foursquare. After taking ownership of all our locations a few months ago, we’ve been updating them with accurate information, up to date imagery and links to additional resources.

Updated Twitter widgets

Twitter are in the process of retiring their v1 API, which meant that that our custom Twitter widget available in the Web CMS was about to stop working. We've updated the template to now use the updated standard Twitter widget and it’s working well.

Improving our YouTube channel and notes on video

If you’ve been following our YouTube channel you may have noticed that some of our videos now have a unified thumbnail scheme. This helps in maintaining a brand identity across the institution - we’ve used departmental colours on the bands across the thumbnails in order to better fit them in. We’ve also been doing something of a spring clean on the channel, deleting some old playlists and updating others.

The featured playlist is now a focus on our History Project, including a new series of oral history videos. If you’re interested in a more multimedia-based history of the University there’s some really interesting content here.

We also added some new tips on producing video for the web which are well worth a read if you’re considering adding video content to your site.

Welcome pages

The undergraduate welcome pages will be seeing a big overhaul for the 2013 intake of students. As well as cutting down on the number of pages, we’ve redesigned them to mesh more closely with the welcome booklet sent out to all new students. The pages will be going live in July, in time to help a whole new generation of students settle in at York.

Website redesign

In more behind-the-scenes news, we’ve been doing a lot of work on preparing for a big website redesign. If you’ve had a look at our 50th site you’ll have already seen an idea of what it’s going to look like, but there’s still a lot more to come!

History of the University - an interactive timeline

Recently we published an interactive timeline on which you can explore the key milestones, facts and figures of the University's 50 year history. There are over 150 entries, including historical images, newspaper clippings and videos of the University's past, all in an easy to use and attractive interactive format.

Building the timeline

The timeline was built using Tiki-Toki, an cloud-based timeline product. We tested quite a lot of alternatives and nothing really compared; it's a great product.

Users can pan, zoom, enlarge and browse stories quickly and easily, including on tablets and smartphones. The timeline can be filtered to just show a particular category of story or searched for keywords. We've been really pleased with the response so far - everyone who has seen it seems to like it.

The Tiki-Toki authoring interface

From the creator's end, too, it is incredibly easy to use, requiring only a date and some text in order to place a story on the timeline. The software automatically places an entry in the relevant spot and manages the spacing of multiple stories. The ability to embed images, audio and video is also helpful, and has allowed us to develop a rich gallery alongside the textual information presented.

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...

It's that time of year again

The run-up to Christmas can only mean one thing: advent themed blogs about web design and development! Here are some of the ones I'll be following this year:

24 ways 
Christmas wouldn't be the same without "the advent calendar for web geeks", which has been running since 2005.

The 12 Days of JISC Digital Media Christmas 
A set of quick tips that'll help you to up the quality of any video and audio you produce. Looks like it'll come in handy for people like us who are making some tentative steps into the world of video production.

HTML5 Adventure calendar
"24 days of killer demos, tutorials, community buzz, and other stuff that Steve Jobs would love". Lots of flashy demos that showcase some of the amazing things that can be done with HTML5 right now.

25 days of blog posts from Web Services at Edge Hill University
Once again I'm impressed that the folk at Edge Hill can pull off a post a day about what they're working on - more than one a month is impressive for me!

When all you have is a (jQuery) hammer, everything looks like a (jQuery) nail

It's no secret around these parts that I'm a big fan of the jQuery JavaScript library. It's certainly changed the way I write code, and has allowed me to do things that I wouldn't have thought possible before. But like most things, it's possible to rely on it a bit too much.

Recently, I wanted include a Twitter feed in a website. My immediate thought was "I bet there's a jQuery plug-in that does that".  And of course, there was one. In fact, there were quite a lot of them.

I tried a few, many of which had lots of impressive sounding features ("show all the tweets from user xyz that use the hashtag #foo and mention the word 'bar'!") . But I wasn't really happy with any of them, as they all felt a bit slow and bloated (probably due to the big list of features that I didn't actually need).

I then remembered that Twitter provides lots of ways to get this data via the Twitter API, as RSS, XML, JSON or whatever format you want. Once you've got that, it just takes a few lines of JavaScript (or you could just use the JavaScript that Twitter provides) to turn that into a feed that's embedded on your site.

Done, without a jQuery plug-in in sight.


Image by Cellular Immunity