Fall 2009 Day 2 - Building uP for Users' Needs

What's in the portal

The portal vision, principles, and guidelines can start by looking at user needs and wants.

Do you determine user needs before you start implementation or after you have something in place?

Often there is a directive from high up in the hierarchy for a portal, and it is often later when they actually decide what should be in it.

Ways to get user input:

• card sorts - good for organization and information architecture, blanks for new ideas
• surveys - cheap, everyone is equal, need to structure carefully, can be structured ("rank these 20 items") and open ended ("what would you like to see?")
• focus groups - ability to set up conversation, best if you already have a clear vision and support from leadership to be prepared for potential downsides, group brain storming can come up with new ideas but individuals can also bias or bring down a group

Need to partner with communications

categorization

UI-Chicago and UW-Madison - tabs are the same for all, portlets on the tabs are role dependent
Michigan and Millikin - role based tabs: faculty, staff, student, alumni

Having role tabs (student, staff, etc) can lead to doubling up and tab overloading.

In general, it seems that determining who can see what content is pretty self-evident (e.g., students see classes they take, instructors see courses they teach, employees see earnings statements). In other cases, the servers/information providers have a good idea who should see their information.

You need to keep it easy, or they will just go to the original source site.

We should have a collection of portal examples (screen shots, information architecture, unique features) on the Jasig wiki. This would help give ideas to individual portal teams, help when giving user groups options, help demonstrate to senior management that there are good portal implementations out there.

It would also be nice to have a showcase of processes, user research, user testing, implementation strategies, governance.

Style guides

It would be valuable to document appropriate styles (CSS), interaction guide (toggles, new windows), branding guideline, support guidelines, performance guidelines, development guidelines.

Resources

It depends on what type of portal you have. Is it primarily a fixed set of content, or pulling in information from departmental web sites, or pulling in data from other campus systems and applications?

What are the future students going to expect, those that are now in primary or secondary schools?

It is important to give your users value in the portal for uit to be successful. Sometimes you can force them to go there (e.g., it is the only place you can enroll or see earnings statements) but you want to also give them value. If you roll out too early, without value, you can lose the chance to make a good first impression.