User Experience Group Notes & Followup

User Experience for uPortal working Group
October 8th, 2008
10:45 - 11:15 pm Auditorium

Below are some of the notes which evolved from a discussion of the conference attendees interested in a user experience group. This group is interested in making our individual portal layouts more intuitive and user friendly, determining best practices for where to place things like login boxes, navigation bars, etc, color schemes and font sizes, etc.

• Portlet lifecyle and best practices being documented on the JASIG wiki.
• We may store something like what pattern tap has?
• Boxes and Arrows design document:
  • http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the-challenge-of
  • http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/introduction-to-the
  • http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/building-block
• The members should upload screenshots of our portals and best practices that we adhere to to give us a starting point to collaborate off of.
• USF has a screenshot gallery at:
  • http://www.stfrancis.edu/myusf
• JASIG Wiki has a document titled "Portlet & Channel UI Widgets"
  • http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1966582
• JASIG also already has a user experience section of the wiki and a mailing list:
  • http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/User+Experience
  • This already has user experience examples and deployed uPortals.
  • All interested people should sign up to the UE mailing list and revive the discussions in it and discuss/share these ideas.
• A design goal of this group should be to collect our notes and examples in a format that can be consolidated and used elsewhere.
• Perhaps we can create our own accounts at pattern tap (patterntap.com) to upload and share screenshots of our portals. This doesnt seem to allow us to add the text of "why" it is a good design, so it may not work.
• Can we create case studies on our portals and put them in the wiki under the UE section?
• We should have a followup session at the JASIG conference in the spring where people give lighting talks on their portal, show and tell, why they did certain things. Begin fostering more ideas among members and provide explanations of this groups findings and why we did certain things.
• We should also look into giving a followup session as the JASIG conference on the collective JASIG UE group knowledge developed and collected.
• Jason Shao to look into possibility of submitted the JASIG UE group findings at Educause too.