Notes:
Basic stats:
About 2500 web pages
About 40,000 hits per day
5 million hits over last semester
About 50 subject matter experts who need to get information published frequently
Lots of audiences: Faculty, staff, IT pros, grads and undergrads, retirees, prospective students, parents
Students want shallow broad information and want to call Help Desk when it gets technical
vs
IT Pros want the nitty gritty details so they can solve problems themselves
Challenging to make both audiences happy
About 3 years ago, started a project to move to a CMS. Selected Drupal; hoping to roll out first version on Feb. 29 (UC permitting).
First rollout: Just getting the content moved over
Later on: Additional features: workflows, things Drupal can do that our current static site can’t
Julieanne:
Current website gets people to static documents, but news is almost ignored
New design emphasizes news and changing information
Old Popular Topics (Hot Topics) was our best guess; new Drupal version is dynamically generated from the list of pages that are being hit most frequently
Help Desk chat now available from all pages
Kept existing navigation system because we’d already tested it; left hand navigation mirrors existing pod structure. Main menu allows deeper immediate navigation frome ach page.
Can feature particular news items at the top of the list regardless of the item’s age (for example, security questions)
Anyone can contribute events by using Webtools calendars – those can be put on both CITES website and campus-wide website
Jason S: Is it currently publicly viewable?
Julieanne: Yes but it’s still under active development, so things may break if you give it a poke.
Irene: Is there a place for status?
Julieanne: Yes – bookmark ribbon at the top, link at the bottom. Want to be able to integrate with status server later, but can’t yet.
Questions from us:
Jake – What do you think that your users could be confused by in this shift?
(silence)
Irene: At Law we’re so isolated, I think it would be really difficult to design for them (our users) because in many cases they don’t know what they’re asking. Outgoing (users) will figure it out on their own but it’s harder for others. Maybe we can set up some way to gather metrics? Right now we don’t.
Kathleen: It would be nice if Help Desk Chat had the phone number – not everyone wants to use the chat feature
Erik – Make it hyperlinked and use SIP URI so you can instantly dial
Jake: What do you think users will like?
Kathleen: It should be less overwhelming. Mostly I send a direct link and they click.
Julieanne: We’ve kept all the URLs the same, so URLs they send out will stay the same.
Irene: Don’t put too much critical stuff up in the header; the big color thing catches eyes, you won’t see stuff other than that
Kathleen: Add some kind of sticky or visual indicator that an “old” news item has been featured
Jake: Thanks to John Barclay for the script that helped us port pages in about 5 minutes rather than 9 months of the last version!
Jake: Anything we could be doing better?
Irene: Tough to tell until we actually start using it.
Kathleen: Ways to deprioritize pages? 2007 pages still coming up prioritized over 2010.
Julieanne: Send feedback to cites-webmaster
Steph: Please let us know if anything is weird or annoying because we want it to work the way you expect it to work!
Irene: I like it!
Julieanne: More we’re hoping to do in future releases. Will be rearchitecting information, hopefully in a helpful way; will keep doing user testing to make sure it really is useful.
Hope to add a knowledge base system where users comfortable with search can skip info architecture and jump straight to what they’re after
Want to bridge gap between audiences – want to have more information for more specific audiences, more specific themes with IT pro specific architecture
Irene: What’s the reference library?
(Holding place for brown bags etci)
Wants an IT library where they can search for stuff pulled from vendor sites or things that we develop ourselves
Julieanne: Could allow end users to suggest things be added, maybe by tagging “important for IT pros”
Cynthia: Will there be a way to point out when stuff exists on the wiki? Currently no way for people to know it’s on the wiki.
Julieanne: Doing that for Lync docs, looking for more opportunities to do that, probably by creating jump pages.
2 questions: Accessibility of content – is there a safety check to make sure things remain accessible after edits happen?
Julieanne: We haven’t done that on the input side; we’re still going through our existing publishing process. The next release will be focused on getting workflows done so CITES users can edit pages and put them in the revisioning queue.
Publish control being given to subject matter experts; will review for accessibility & usability after it’s created.
Going to be offering training to subject matter experts and staff about best practices for creating usable, accessible, user-friendly content.
Going to be providing writing assistance to subject matter experts (hi, Shaun!)
Formats well on iPad, but iPhone doesn’t display well
(We’re aware of that; we’re working on it.)
Cynthia – Security is also moving to Drupal
Have had discussions about the potential added value of video snippets – does that seem valuable? Would it be a waste of time?
Keith: One of the concerns with video is that if it’s conveying critical information, there have to be transcripts and captions. Have you considered that?
Kathleen: I think it could be useful for email 101 and how-tos as long as there’s actual text too. I HATE the Lync documentation videos – just TELL me what’s what!
Irene: Give me five bullet points instead of a 10 minute video. There’s no time for the video.
Can do them and see what the stats are with Drupal.
Might be suited to bigger ideas (vision, philosophy, fireside chat) rather than technical documentation.
Jason: Why Drupal?
Julieanne & group:
It has a really strong development community, very modular so you don’t have to install what you’re not usign which helps with security.
Very accessible, accessibility & usability pledges among developers. Easy to create your own module if you need functionality that’s not there.
Very good at consuming standards-compliant code like Webtools. Already has a lot of traction on campus (ATLAS, ACES, Education, more).
Scales really well.
For an organization as big as CITES, it has a robust user access and privilege model.
Revamping script / PHP infrastructure?
We’re not terribly concerned about it; we’re running security scans to catch holes, and we think PHP is worth the power it gives us. Can easily remove modules if one gives a security problem.
Biggest challenge implementing Drupal? Did anyone know Drupal in advance?
The learning curve was high. Andrew spent about a year trying to get over the learning curve and hadn’t made it. Julieanne joined us with Drupal experience, which helped out a TON. Also, problems with infrastructure – the server we were given had Red Hat 4, and needed to be newer.
Parsing out the link formats was Julieanne’s biggest challenge and it’s still ongoing.