Personalization, Navigation, Information Architecture for UPortal
October 7th, 2008
1 - 2pm Room 205
At this session several schools discussed ideas and thoughts around getting the relevant information a portal user is looking for in an easy to find spot. Several of the bullet points discussed and listed below:
- How do you break up the various services offered by your portal?
- Tabs – Thought process is by the greatest common denominator. Who benefits the most, drives the decision on what gets shown.
- One driving decision is the space/real estate available to the student. With a portal we should know what a student profile is, so we should be able to make intelligent decisions.
- Many institutions tabs are role based.
- Mayland Institute College of Art – Performed a study to describe the terminology a user uses to describe a task.
- Links may need to be a few words (7 to 12) to accurately convey what the student/user is expecting to happen when they click on the link.
- Drilling down through links is not necessarily bad, as long as they are on a strong "scent"
- 5 Second Page Test
- Put the page in front of users for 5 seconds, take it away, and then ask the user what they saw.
- Can be used to test what information stands out the most.
- Announcements and messages – Classes of announcements that show up on a specific page, or on top of all pages. The user also has the choice to make the announcement go away. We don't want the user to train their muscle memory to constantly "look away" from a section...
- Indiana University built this.
- Contact Tara: tbazler@indiana.edu
- Concept of "My Page" – An empty tab that the user is allowed to build out.
- Go to my.wisc.edu
- Click on the demo button
- Pick faculty/advisor/student, and allows the user to see various demos.
- IU has a "My Zone" tab with announcements the student may have deleted
- They can mark their preferred content (bookmarks)
- Flexibility for the student to add their own sub tabs, add content to it, use IU portlets and bring in other content from other URLs and specify the height/width of the display area for that content.
- Student can have up to 5 tabs, no more than that are allowed.
- Skins – Small percentage of people actually use this
- Anything you can do to save a student, faculty, etc time, is a return on investment to the institution.
- IU Concept – In the left sidebar there is a list titled "Most Popular"
- List is generated by the top 10 services that students are using over the past 30 days. Role also plays into this...So a student/staff member would see the links to the top services that both students and staff members use.
- Chunk of the screen that if it says something, it means the student has something to do. If it is blank or empty, the student doesn't have to do anything.
- Put lots of branding on the public landing page, where the user logs in to the system. Once the person is logged in, think of the space on the screen as the user's, not the institutions. Make the logo smaller, etc.
- Design goal is to have the portlets and information play nice with the other aggregated information on the same page.