Squiz Seminar: Challenges & Solutions for Web Experience Management

Dan JacksonDevelopment Manager

About City

• City University London is an international University committed to academic excellence with a focus on business and the professions.

• The University is in the top 5% of world universities according to the times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010. 

• City is ranked 10th in the UK both for graduate employability according to The Times Good University Guide 2011 and graduate starting salaries according to The Sunday Times University Guide 2011.

• City attracts over 22,000 students from around 160 countries.

The next half an hour

1. About City’s site redesign project.2. How we modelled our website.3. Putting theory into practice.

Our ‘website redesign’ project

Two new corporate websites (www.city.ac.uk, www.cass.city.ac.uk) and a new intranet for staff and students (http://intranet.city.ac.uk).

New CMS, new search engine, new servers, new network, new content, new IA, new design, new features and functionality, new project methodology, new code control & deployment processes, new content approval workflows, new business processes, etc. etc.

The Benefits

1. Raised profile of our development teams.2. Greater appreciation of our in-house talents.3. Focus on usability. 4. Massive content cull.5. Introduction of web content governance.6. Agile.7. Some great new tech!

A Story

Domain Driven Design

“Domain-driven design (DDD) is an approach to developing software for complex needs by deeply connecting the implementation to an evolving model of the core business concepts.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design

Domain Driven Design

The design of our website should directly reflect the areas of knowledge or activities (‘domains’) of our University.

Domain Driven Design

What is our ‘atomic element’? It has to be The Course

Why university course finders suck

“...course finders are typically slow and page based. The user is forced to navigate a series of link intensive and text heavy pages, before finding information on a single course. There is no ability to compare courses, filter results or receive course suggestions. Instead the course finder is treated like any other page of textual content on the site.”

Paul Boag, http://boagworld.com/usability/university-course-finders-suck/

So how can we build a course finder that doesn’t suck (as badly)?

• Make it more akin to a single screen web application than a series of link-heavy pages.

• Focus on usability and search design patterns, notably auto-suggestion and faceted navigation .

Why Auto-Suggestion works

• Continual feedback helps rapid narrowing of results.• Reduces the number of keystrokes, allowing for

faster user input.

Facets

“Facets are categories that describe the properties of an object or collection of objects.”

http://experiencinginformation.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/faceted-navigation-typical-structures-for-values/

Wine Courses

Region Subject

Grape Award Level

Colour School

Price Department

Rating

Why faceted navigation works

• Findability: Users can’t sign up to courses that they can’t find, and faceted navigation has been shown to improve findability.

• “Aboutness”: Facets show the overall semantic make-up of a collection. They convey the breadth and type of a results list, for instance.

• Confidence: Faceted navigation increases information scent.

• Reduced Uncertainty: Users don’t have to specify precise queries.

Source: http://experiencinginformation.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/roi-of-faceted-navigation/

Thank YouQuestions?