Who You Calling A Jesse?

There has been a bit of a discussion in the uwebd list about when is the right time to launch a higher ed web site. Thinking that launch is for new sites and re-launch is for re-branding and something you do with care, my first reaction was “why would you launch a new higher web site?” There is still a tendency in higher education to launch new designs on the campus community from time to time and I think, in modern web time, that is nuts.

Think of the people that use your web site, how they use it, how long they have been using, and who the redesign is for? Are they the same people? Flipping the switch on large changes (navigation, content, etc) is, at an informed guess level, expensive. Every day users are disrupted, new users don’t notice, and the occasional student user likely will think a refresh gets in the way and ask why does their online course environment still suck when you obviously have time to make changes on this site?

Major website overalls on public sites are a waste of resources with little ROI

Here is a generalized version of redesign process in higher ed:

• Someone says ‘we need a fresh look’ (usually fueled by marketing folks or recruitment ‘studies’)
• Committee is formed to look at ‘revamping’ the home page
• 6-24 months pass with around a dozen people on a committee discussing designs
• assumptions are based on personal preferences about what people want to see on the web
• Someone brings up implementing or changing the CMS, another committee is formed to look at that in parallel
• ‘three’ designs are chosen, CMS’s are investigated
• In a perfect world usability studies occur
• In the practical world, ‘previews’ are given to key politically sensitive areas on campus
• After some news releases and committee discussions at various levels some last minute ‘additions’ to menus or content are made for the flavour of the month
• page is launched
• users freak out, some love it, some hate it, all have to learn the new navigation to get on with what they have to do online
• more additions are required for political reasons

Have I gone through this? Yes, twice in seven years. I changed jobs just before my third time came around. In the 15 years or so of a web presence for most schools I would imagine they have done this an average of 4 times with the range between 3 and 8.

This cycle plays out just about everywhere in higher education and I think it largely because we ask each other what we did and copy/tweak/repeat. My guess is that the investment into this type of cycle is around:

• at least 3 FTE of ~45K salaries initially
• into the dozens of FTE for campus wide change
• if you buy a CMS ~100-500K plus more FTE

There is also a cost in disrupting people’s work flows (staff tend to have click patterns to things they need everyday, moving that causes cardiac conditions to worsen), committee time, and the other things that don’t get done.

What do you get back on that investment? Nothing. I don’t believe for one second that students decide to go to a particular higher education institution because their website looked cool, modern, etc. If high school students say that they are just telling you what you want to hear (teenagers do that? really?). Finding the information they need about what it is like to go to school there, programs, the city, the cost, etc would influence them but not a picture of a researcher up to their waste in sludge (grad students that care already know who that it and what they do).

Incremental changes by design and invest in content: clear, concise, informative

I am not saying you should never freshen up your website. You most certainly should but it should never require a re-launch unless you re-branding or something significant. Slight changes to navigation, content, colours, etc can occur without throwing it all out and starting fresh. Your previous design can’t be that bad (if it is, replace it by all means) but it is likely looking pre-web 2.0 or worse, way overboard on web 2.0ness. So clean it up, design change, but don’t do a demolition unless you absolutely have to.

Take your experience with other websites. If you have to be there to find something do you care what it looks like? No. You only care if you can’t find the information you need or if Google didn’t get you to a quality source on the first search. Students, staff, faculty, friends, etc all come to a higher education website not to hang out but they come to find out specific information. If they can find it and it is readable and your site isn’t some over designed 10px paradise with animated gifs they will have a positive experience.

I do believe things like HTML 5 and Microformats places more focus on the content then the look as the content becomes more portable. More and more people do not see your content in a look and feel that you have 100% control over (you never had 100% control) so why focus on that? Make it so your content is structured properly and relevant. Search engines will like you more as will the people using them.

Update: Smashing posted an Article on Feb 3rd on what being clear and effective in communication on the web means. Facebook offers a great example of continuous improvement in design without relaunching anything (the new design was launched once but changed many times) over a period of 5 years

Where design efforts should be focused: on the tools students use everyday

…and that is a whole other blog post. Fact is that higher education rarely spends time on the experience in web based applications that students, staff, faculty must use everyday. Why is that? I have some thoughts that I will post later ;)

A twitter conversation got me rethinking about the concept of content vs design yet again. I am constantly in a battle with having to design an interface for content, actions, and requirements that are either contradicting or simply not known yet. That is hugely frustrating however there are ways to design some general things without knowing the specific content and through a few iterations you get there. That is usually what you are forced to do if you are trying to be truly agile.

In Higher ed, what rules is content or design? My feeling is that it is still content. Aside from Alumni and High School students, the gross majority of consumers of information in the higher ed web space are a captive audience. They are staff, students, and faculty that are simply doing their daily activities in a web space they have to use. Sweating over design and what that design should be may not be a fair trade off over just simple content organization. If content is so important I think the use of Microformats is as well because it allows the higher ed space to open up that useful content to a larger audience and potentially enables their internal audiences to use that content better.

Design (impressive, high end, etc) should be more important for micro-sites that are targeting external audiences. An impressive design can be that ‘wow’ factor that will attract those high school students or make your internal audience more comfortable to find information within your web space. However, content may still be more important in the form of a social media foot print in youtube, twitter, facebook, and other places where you don’t have control over design… only the content.

That is not to say good design isn’t needed but I think if you have only 1 day to spend fixing something in your higher ed web space, fix up the content.

In my paper, my research focused on an assessment technique and possible application of Microformats on a higher education home page. What I don’t think I included in that report was a really good reason why you would apply the formats to your entire site or if the current formats are good enough. There are many   making the case out there that cover the ‘why’ with my favourite being that you can make your web site or web application your API. That line of thought is what I applied when UW Events was built.

How does that work in higher education specifically? In higher education there are many issues that make a universal application or Microformats fairly difficult. But higher education web sites have so many consistent patterns in content and design along with a general attitude of openness that there is a huge opportunity that could be realized through the application of current and future Microformats.

Using the following diagram you can apply a couple use cases.

One of the use cases that initially comes to mind is the student that is trying to figure out what courses are offered at what school and where those schools are:

• geo and hatom can give a student an idea of the location and the latest news coming out of the school
• a new format for course information (lets call it hCourse for now) can help a student compare courses across different schools
• hReview can mix in prof rating and/or course rating web sites that use hReview to mark up their ratings and a student can get a better picture of things.

Another would be a prof trying to determine where to spend their next sabbatical without knowing much about the smaller schools in a particular area:

• the geo information can accurately place the schools
• hatom would give them quick access to the latest news
• a format for course information (hcourse) can help them connect with new colleague with similar interests
• hreview can reveal a hidden quality a smaller institution might have

A third scenario might be a person that is looking for a good resource on a story or book. Usually that information is being sent to the typical media outlets.

• hatom identifies the news so it can be easily found through searches
• geo can tie that information to a particular area

This is just off the top of my head, I could probably go on for a while about how easier to find and more accurate content could enhance the experience for people that are looking for information. I can think of some political barriers to this but thankfully it doesn’t require a top down decision to apply it. In the spirit of higher education, application of Microformats can be done on a grass roots effort without any decisions needing to be made ;)

Almost a year ago now I started exploring the idea of a research paper on Microformats with regards to Higher Education. After doing some research I settled on assessing ten Higher Education web sites, their mark-up and their content, identify some common patterns and explore the viability of Microformats for the typical Higher Education home page.

• You can grab a version of my paper in acrobat.com but if you want a PDF version please leave a comment.

In my paper you will find a literature review, the method I used, all the data, and my results. I did write this over the winter so things might have changed a bit and it certainly isn’t a perfectly written paper… but I think it offers a way to approach semantic mark-up that I hope some people find useful.

From my research, I developed a process to identify a design pattern for Higher Education web sites in both the mark-up code and the content. It may not be the most efficient but it seemed to do the trick.

I used those design patterns to come up with a mock-up of what the University of Waterloo home page could be (not graphically, just semantically) and tried out how that could be useful. My mock-up has:

• hAtom for news
• hCal for event listings
• hCard for the University address with geo information

There is also some other semantic richness in there. I thought that maybe someone would find it useful as there really isn’t a lot of research with regards to applying Microformats and why.

update: I have another post that looks at how Microformats can help higher education

In August of 2005 I was bored and frustrated. I decided to check out graduate education options even though my undergrad experience pretty much sucked. After looking around I decided to try out the University of Liverpool’s Masters of Information Technology. At the time it was a relatively new program and I was hesitant to take a Msc via distance learning. Plus I couldn’t afford it and work wasn’t going to pay.

Ignoring all that, I went ahead and applied. Since then I have hit highs and lows—distance education is a lot of work and takes a lot more discipline than I thought I had to get things done. But now, 2.5 years later I have just made my final submission for my dissertation. I hated it and I loved it… I certainly had the best education experience I have yet to have in my life and would do it again.

Once the paper is graded I will post more about that. I did it on Microformats ;) Nothing too exciting, just looking at how they could be applied… in 91 pages with appendices!

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

Is there a template out there for evaluating web page content in order to identify content patterns that would stand the test of academics? Surely there must be. So far I haven’t been able to find one as most of the research on semantics focuses on application based on a given content type you are creating or using. What I am trying to do is research a site, identify patterns, apply Microformats to the patterns, then figure out if there is a need for a new format based on the content.

What would need to identify a pattern in web content? Two years ago in WebPatterns and WebSemantics John Allsopp (the guy who wrote the Microformats book ) posted a great summary of what are patterns and how can you identify them. John mentions the area of web patterns is under-researched and references a great collection of patterns in web sites (that is missing the higher education pattern) but unfortunately for me I don’t think I can use that as key reference.

Interestingly enough, identifying web application patterns is exactly what my team and I have been doing with the new JobMine system. What I need to find out is where this has been before and in what capacity. Documenting UI elements is nothing knew but I think the criteria for the documentation is pretty loose and perhaps there is a need for one.

When I have my research criteria defined I will post it, any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated ;)

After a little delay, a couple weeks ago I started a page in the Microformats wiki to start collecting some examples and hopefully draft a format for course catalogue information. I see this as a really useful format to create for a number of different reasons.

Think about having an application that just search all universities course information and compare similarly numbered courses or courses with similar keywords? Think about how easy it would be for Universities when trying to translate transcripts for students that are transferring or heading to a school out of the country? Looking up that information yourself is not fun at the moment. Perhaps a Microformat can make it easy…

This should be a simple task. I am hoping to get some more examples of what currently exists from schools outside of Canada and maybe even some schema information on closed course information systems in the hope that some consistency exists already. I am fairly certain a draft format could be made quickly and easily but some research is required to ensure it works for the most amount of schools. Anyway have a look at the working space and add your 0.02.

Anyone can contribute really… so please do.