Tag Archives: Usability

Guerrilla Gardening, day two

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Adapting the Course page content

Any hopes of getting hold of a clean and complete data source of every course’s details were soon dashed. The CMS – which of course thinks in pages in most instances. This is great as it makes updates and devolving of content submission far easier, but I need to work around it.

Title, URL, and Course Type

The CMS will easily give up Course Title and URL, but accessing award, availability for clearing and other attributes of the pages would require far more work, possibly HTTP spidering.

The structure we gave to the Courses area when last reworked thankfully lends itself well to grabbing these additional attributes -Â denoted by their publication. Each of the three Course Types are published to a location determined by its award type:

<site root>/courses/undergraduate/

<site root>/courses/postgraduate/

<site root>/courses/cpd/

With a new templated page in the CMS connected to the content of the Course pages, I can quickly generate a rough data source for Course Title and URL into a list. I can bypass the Compliance and tidy management tools for the template, allowing me to make whatever document format I need from the source.

Availability for Clearing

For a short time each year the Clearing attribute comes into play. The courses available for Clearing are a subset of undergraduate courses, created by adding an attribute to each page.

Another great feature of the CMS is keyword assignment, which allows pages to be aggregated into lists of links and titlesfor use elsewhere.

Keyword assignment list creation in the CMS

Keyword assignment list creation in the CMS

The Clearing keyword allows me to create such a list, giving me my final data source.

For the moment I’ll leave each output page as a simple HTML list of the format:

<ul>
  <li><a href="courseurl_1">Course Name 1 <a/></li>
  <li><a href="courseurl_2">Course Name 2 <a/></li>
</ul>

With a snapshot of data output to files, I can begin to put together some of the proposed components. An added bonus here is that my simple data sources have by necessity been separated by Course Type, which is no bad thing as that’s the fisrt fork in the road for most visitors to the Courses pages.

With luck, more tomorrow.

Guerilla Gardening, day one

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Plot Chosen. The Courses area.

View the category Guerrilla Gardening for the full story

It’s a high traffic part of the site presenting probably the most important pre-application content we have. Over the years it’s had gradual improvements, most notably a modified mooTools accordion feature to accommodate the various Course Types in easily identified compartments which open and close with a click.

The page content is fully accessible without Javascript, and is fine for screen readers.

By Default all accordion boxes are closed, except the Search All Courses box

By Default all accordion boxes are closed, except the Search All Courses box

The Course Page

The purpose of the page is – unsurprisingly – to effectively get a prospective applicant to the course or courses that interest them, it should be so usable, you don’t even know how you arrived at the course you came for.

When first loaded four compartments are visible, with Undergraduate courses, Postgraduate courses and CPD (Continuing Professional Development) all represented in a closed state.

By default the bottom box is open, providing a course search facility.

The Undergraduate Section open, showing the A-Z Listings links

The Undergraduate Section open, showing the A-Z Listings links

Opening any Course Type shows a clickable alphabet, clicking on the letter ‘A’ in Undergraduate takes you to the undergraduate ‘A’ Listings page.

While only one set of A-Z links is ever visible, there are three sets of Alphabetised links embedded in the page.

The Course Search does not filter by Course Type as the alphabetised links do. As it employs the website-wide search facility, it temporarily navigates the user away from the courses area to display search results within the usual search page, related side links, which makes return navigation problematic.

A typical use case involving searching for multiple courses might take a user across two pages before reaching the course page and the a single return step to the Courses Home.

The (Rough) Plan

Rough Draft of the proposed layout

Rough Draft of the proposed layout

Off the top of my head, I’d like to:

  • remove the repeating elements presented on the page
  • develop a dynamic single-view for all courses, with minimal clicks or page loads
  • keep the search results within the Courses part of the site
  • show links to courses from the outset, with no A-Z pages required
  • Maintain the usual editing and update regime via the CMS
  • Maintain accessibility

Whether or not it results in a deployable application doesn’t yet concern me so much as the steps necessary to achieve it – which in themselves will be useful later on.

As all the information resides in the Content Management System or its published pages, the first steps involve overcoming retrieval and formatting.

For starters I’ll need to:

  • Adapt the current Courses area content into some sort of re-usable data source
  • Use the data sources to populate an easy-to-use course selector
  • Justify my own time by developing some ideas for re-using the data elsewhere