Category Archives: work stuff

Course Finder, an eventual reality

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A long time ago…

Back in 2009, I examined the way in which courses could be listed and searched for at my University and developed a prototype user-interface to increase the visibility of each course we offer.

Things began as a personal project carried out in spare time – an ‘unofficial, unbidden and unapproved endeavour’ I described it back then – with the aim of creating something demonstrably useful that could be further developed.

Revisiting the basics

The design and prototyping was extensively blogged at the time, and the first prototype demo’d (to a packed tent ;-) ) at BathCamp BarCamp 2009. You can read more about the UX design in the following posts tagged guerrilla-gardening. In 2011, development of the interface has finally begun in earnest.

Available Data

The greatest limitation at inception was available data. Course information was coming from a content-managed JSON source and provided only course title and web-page URL. It must also be understood that while there is knowledge of formal course data formats, we have none in use that combine course and marketing information. Thankfully, a separate project to manage course web-page delivery through Microsoft Sharepoint has allowed full database access to extensive course information.

New design and UX considerations

Here’s how things looked in 2009:

Scrolling the Course Listings by starting letter

The first change is that we’ll be concentrating on undergraduate courses, so no tab structure.

Secondly, we had a rather ugly switch from course title lists to a title + summary listing from the Ultraseek search API, but the more reliable data source has changed that.
The latest incarnation treats course listings as definitive course records, so when an as-you-type filter phrase is searched for with a click of the search button, the results aren’t re-presented but they’re used to augment the existing course listing with a summary of text from the live page.

Thirdly, stakeholders in the project agreed that being able to update the list the moment you type a letter means we can do away with the row of alphetic teeth that previously mirrored the Content Managed A-Z list pages (they’re days are numbered too).

One new feature on-the-cards is sorting/grouping by faculty, again afforded to us by better data. This should allow for a lightweight, low overhead means of seeing related courses, grouped by faculty and highlighted by the corporate faculty colour.

As-you-type filtering narrows the list as before, but also updates a match count and six other course counters for each displayed faculty.

Type ‘engineer’ for example and you see the bulk of courses under the Faculty of Technology, where you may find other courses related to your area of interest. Type ‘forensics’, and you see courses across Business, Technology and Science, inviting you to examine their differences.

Under the hood

The bulk of the code is still classic ASP (I know, I know). jQuery has replaced Scriptaculous/Prototype for the client-side interaction, a design choice primarily, but also a matter of support knowledge.

Basic course listings are served in an unordered list for static-page accessibility, and they’re then enhanced with JSON-based detailed course information. We’ll be popping the scrolling list to full height for compatibility with mobile devices in the short term.

Of course, the JSON formatting of detailed course information by faculty is an opportunity in itself.

We’ll be using Google Analytics, our tracker of choice for some time now to see if this makes a difference, which given the tens of page loads we’re saving ought be significant. Track Events will also be used to assess every client-side interaction with the Course Finder to inform its future development.

New advantages

It is hoped that as-and-when it goes live, faculties should be able to link directly to their own listings in the main marketing courses area, so eliminating the need for duplicated content in the CMS. An upgrade to IISÂ affords the opportunity finally get course titles in the URLs using something akin to Apache mod_rewrite.

Deployment is imminent.

Guerrilla Gardening the Institutional Web

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Something else was going on in Colchester around the time of IWMW 20009. While delegates of the Institutional Web Management Workshop were hearing the mantra ‘seek forgiveness rather than permission’ for any improvements we’d like to make to our institutional web provision, The Human Shrub was hard at work with some unapproved upgrades of his (or her) own.

Inspired by the guerrilla gardener I’ve decided to take some direct action on an area of our site. I’m going to tell no-one, and work by cover of darkness. I’ve yet to decide on an outfit.

The aim is to use spare time and all available methods to improve the look and feel, user interface and usability of the area in a non-invasive way, avoiding all the usual time constraints. By the end I hope to have something suitable to replace or update the area that all stakeholders will find difficult to refuse. To do this:

  • All work must be carried out on breaks, out of hours or overnight
  • No live content will be touched, proof of concept will be devised & created as alternate services
  • Extant environment and systems will be respected – that means working with the CMS, with the means of editing and deployed using the normal methods
  • Ease of integration or implementation a major determinant of any approach (so no recreating the whole site as a Symfony plug-in)
  • As with any unofficial, unbidden and unapproved endeavour, the goals will shift & adapt as and when.
  • Horticultural metaphors will abound.

Woking …ham

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Writing from Wokingham – redDot Liveserver training. Last day today, so we’ll be heading back sometime in the afternoon. Hopefully we’ll be dropping into Burghclere to see the murals by Stanley Spencer at the memorial chapel.

edit: got to Burghclere, well after dark and if it had been open, it was, by then, shut.

We’ve been spoiled here as the accommodation is adjoined to the excellent pub, so the food and drink has been great and in good supply!

I managed to lock myself out of the en-suite. Managed to get it open again (with a bit of jury-rigging involving a pen-refill) but didn’t figure out how it happened in the first place.

Wiki Promotion – an utterly childish solution for small teams

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Thanks go to Phil Wilson for his post about Wiki promotion in small teams. I ran an impromptu formatting tutorial at my desk yesterday, and continue to post everything I do, then mail the link to the team. Few, but some of us, are using Feedreader to get updates.

In a new twist, I’m appealing to their inner children, and a little fear and mistrust can also go a long way. In short:

we’ve started keeping scores for The Circle Game on the wiki.

All in all it’s working, I have been distracted from this post twice now due to my Wiki’ing cohorts. What’s more they’re using it for work stuff too.

Simple returns

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Simple Back Button generator (opens in a new window)

It’s not rocket science, in fact it’s probably not even breadmaker science, but it’s useful. Detects if there’s a history to return to before adding a back button to a menu of your choosing.

Our CMS generated breadcrumb trail reflects the site structure, not an individual user’s path into the site – this was one possible solution to the loss of adequate return navigation when you go from one site area (say a school) to another (a service team perhaps).

Blogtastic

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Finally the team has a WordPress MU installation up and running – we’re now creating a flurry of blogs for everyone (including one of the Operators, who’ll be running a ‘claim to fame’ blog which started this whole process off.

MU appears to have a just a few limitations which we may need to iron out, but no showstoppers so far. It’s running on the same VM as the wiki, but thankfully now on a dedicated server – not my desktop!