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.

Building the York Research Database

Today we launched the brand new York Research Database to the public. This is a web view of all York's research activity, as stored in Atira's Pure, the University's CRIS (Current Research Information System). It's been a long time in gestation while the data has been cleaned and updated, but I think it's been worth the wait.

Encouraging discovery

Initially the Web Office's involvement was just to help skin the public view of the data that shipped with the product. We did that, but something felt lacking - if you knew what you wanted then you would find it, but then what? We wanted people to explore and discover the breadth and depth of the research going on at York, and our first implementation didn't quite nail that.

We worked closely with our local Pure project team and the team at Atira to build features that would encourage a deeper dive into the data. Development work was being handled by Atira so we went through several rounds of generating ideas, building mockups and then liaising with them about implementation. It was a great process, covering everything from adding big features to me being very pedantic about micro-copy in the pages, and the whole team at Atira were brilliant throughout.

Eureka

I confess I was sceptical when I first looked at web views of research data, both York's and at other Universities; they never really held my interest. My 'eureka' moment with our system came when I was testing the latest iteration of our work with Atira one day and realised I'd stopped testing and was just browsing computer science research. If the system could distract me from nitpicking about the design and features, I was confident it would encourage others to dig deeper too.

Features to help exploration

A few of the things we added to the vanilla product which I think make a big difference:

• 'Refine your results' links, with indicators to show how many results you'll get with that refinement applied, on search results pages. These just apply advanced search filters, but make them much more visible and easier to toggle on and off.
• 'By the same authors' and 'From the same journal' sidebars on publications pages. These are great for following a trail of related content.
• 'Recently viewed' links in the footer of every page. Each record in the database that you look at during a visit to the site stacks up in a series of lists in the footer of every page so that you can easily get back to the things you've seen already.

Links from staff profiles and department pages

Now that the York Research Database is live, we've enabled a field in the staff profile template in the CMS to make it easy to link to your profile page. There are more details on the Pure web pages for staff, including images to use to make links from departmental research pages and elsewhere too.

Measuring success

I'll be poring over Google Analytics in weeks to come to see whether we've managed to make the site as engaging as I hoped. You can let us know what you think in the comments, by tweeting us @uoywebteam or by emailing me direct at dan.wiggle@york.ac.uk.