| smeranda | shares | Attending the Designing a New User-Centric College Public Website - Lessons Learned. #heweb08 |
Oct 06, 2008 -
10:43AM
| smeranda | shares | Attending the Designing a New User-Centric College Public Website - Lessons Learned. #heweb08 |
| smeranda | says | leadership realized website fragmented, so thed decided to fix it. St. Louis Community College. www.stlcc.edu/ |
| smeranda | says | Going through some history of the college now, large community college |
| smeranda | says | 3 sites, public, internal for faculty sharing and a sharepoint site. |
| smeranda | says | 16,000 pages with no navigation standard - yikes! |
| smeranda | says | site wasn't built for the external user, another problem to fix. |
| smeranda | says | Good to see the college realizes the user-centric problems created by inconsistency, non-ADA compliance. |
| smeranda | says | no that problem defined, discovery stage is next |
| alvin | says | seth is using plurk as a notebook  |
| almostcool | says | live-blogging baby! |
| smeranda | says | lot's of great user stats from research. Hope the slides will be online soon. |
| smeranda | says | 30% of students couldn't find what they were looking for on the site. |
| smeranda | says | 92 different technologies used on their 16,000 pages. |
| smeranda | says | 10 minutes into presentation, and speaker concerned he is behind... must have a lot of content to go through |
| Mort_Blort | says | Increased enrollment is goal ... will be interesting to see how they attribute that. |
| smeranda | says | Sounds like the Serena Collage CMS isn't popular with users. |
| saltybeagle | and how do you attribute increased enrollment to the website..? |
| Mort_Blort | says | yeah, exactly. |
| Mort_Blort | says | I just say "the website is responsible for all increased enrollment." |
| smeranda | says | Not sure that you can, but you can report on other metrics... speed of which content was found, decreased friction... |
| almostcool | says | hrmm... we had increased enrollment right about the time we launched the full redesign in '06.... |
| smeranda | says | "create an agile development for future-proofing" that is always helpful |
| Mort_Blort | says | Yes; then assumptions can be made on which you can base theories and test them. Surveys of entering students. |
| smeranda | says | Tower 29 worked on development, note for myself. |
| smeranda | says | load-balancing graphic on the screen... This was more than a visual redesign |
| smeranda | says | taxonomy creates navigation - Many areas recreating the wheel and they are trying to change to a more collaborative effort. Sounds familiar? |
| Mort_Blort | says | They seem to have a much more systematic approach to content, though, which I suppose is more possible at a CC level. |
| smeranda | says | Quicklinks convention by the user is that you will jump to another website according to speaker. |
| smeranda | says | Would like to see some research on this point. |
| smeranda | says | Using Active Data Exchange calendaring |
| smeranda | says | Blackboard LMS and other various home-grown applications |
| smeranda | says | and Windows Live student email |
| saltybeagle | they're caught in the Windows Live edu trap also, eh? |
| Mort_Blort | says | QL convention can't jump, IIRC, and be accessible |
| smeranda | says | Ad hoc web committee created to develop phase 1 |
| Mort_Blort | says | Did they get their $10M? |
| almostcool | says | looks fairly comprehensive, although i admit that i didn't click really deep. did they say what % of the 16k pages they converted? |
| smeranda | says | "jump" as in leave, not the JS functionality. |
| smeranda | says | I'll ask on the 16k pages. |
| smeranda | says | New positions were created to help, restructure the IT department to be more web-focused. |
| smeranda | says | Content belongs to community relationship/structure support belongs to IT. Great model. |
| Mort_Blort | says | Want to pick their brains on that after. |
| Mort_Blort | says | Politics of it |
| smeranda | says | Phase 2 is the future: more dynamic content. |
| smeranda | says | New focus on enrollment management, new position/department created |
| smeranda | says | CRM to come... intrigued to see what they are looking at. |
| Mort_Blort | says | Smaller = more agile, or so it seems |
| smeranda | says | active involvement by faculty during process, a plus. |
| smeranda | says | successful integration of home-grown applications. Define "successful". |
| smeranda | says | Speaker: "Never outsource content development, this is what you do as an institution." Right on. |
| Mort_Blort | says | "Need to be at seventh-grade reading level." |
| Mort_Blort | says | I think he's talking about the community college audience. |
| Mort_Blort | says | But that's a perspective we could probably use; simplicity and friendliness. |
| smeranda | says | Little things can break the user experience. It's a fragile world. |
| smeranda | says | Vendor stopped working on product one week before going live. |
| Mort_Blort | says | group moan. |
| smeranda | says | they had more hardward than necessary... We'll take your extra servers!  |
| almostcool | says | again, if they take questions, ask about the % of pages they flipped. i'm just curious given our own experience |
| george sackett | is | flipped very little content. almost all rewritten - went from 16,000 pages to 1,600 pages |
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