IWMW blogs

Keith Doyle explains the purpose of his parallel session: “Developing Your Personal Contingency Plan: Beat The Panic” in this short video interview with Kirsty Pitkin…

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Matthew Hoskins discusses his parallel session: “Taxonomy: Creating structure across content using metadata” in this interview with Kirsty Pitkin…

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Mike Nolan from Edge Hill University summarises his parallel session: “Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web” in this quick video interview with Kirsty Pitkin…

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Joss Winn, Technology Officer at University of Lincoln, discusses his parallel session “WordPress Beyond Blogging” with Billy Fallows…

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Jeremy Speller of UCL set the scene for his presentation by taking us back to 2005, when he was presenting at IWMW on 7th July. He showed how the first information about the bombings in London came through on the IRC that was being used as a backchannel at the time, and described his helplessness when the network connection he needed for his live demo went down as a result.

Speller’s talk took us through the range of web-based communication options available to ensure messages get out in a range of crisis situations and argued that web teams need to be actively involved in advising their institutions’ crisis plans. Very often these plans omit the web team. Speller emphasised that web teams are communications experts and should be advising the other parties, as well as considering how best to protect their own systems, upon which the operation of the institution and its staff and students rely.

Speller asked us to consider the tools that could be our “megaphones of communication” and used a love heart illustration, which varied in size to indicate his own preference for certain options. Whilst he acknowledged the use of tools such as Twitter and Facebook for communication in a disaster situation, he emphasised the need to link these in to updates from a central source. He recommended the use of JANET, which provides a bunkered, off-site system. The advantage of this is that it offers a virtual server, on which you can install WordPress. WordPress can be linked easily with a variety of other tools (including Twitter) using plugins. Because this is your own installation of WordPress, you have control over the plugins (which you do not with a WordPress.com site), so you have greater flexibility and fewer unknowns!

He outlined some of the information dissemination routes which have an inherent level of unreliability, usually because the data involved is prone to being incomplete or inaccurate. This included using student and staff personal (non-university) email addresses and mobile telephone numbers. However, he noted the potential to keep university email services going in the event of a disaster affecting the university servers for those using Live@edu.

Speller also outlined a suggested system of offering university web service back up as a shared service. He noted that this may not work well between just two institutions, illustrating with UCL and St Andrews (UCL may be confident with St Andrews maintaining an emergency version of their site, but St Andrews may find a London-based back up of theirs may not help in the event of certain types of disaster). However, if a network was established, this could be an effective route to keep the basics going in a cost effective way.

To conclude, he reminded us that in the worse-case scenario, there was always the option of a megaphone! We can be prepared, but there will always be situations where nothing is available. In the questions, Chris Gutteridge of University of Southampton described the situation they found themselves in when their back up essential “black box” survived as designed, but fire crews would not allow access to it for 7 weeks. He explained what they had learnt from the process of coping without it and how their emergency plans had been strengthened by this. Brian Kelly also noted how information in an emergency would not always be provided by the university, but perhaps by other agencies, like the local travel company. Working together with these information providers would also make the university crisis plan more resilient.

Jeremy’s slides are available at Slideshare here.

This year we held our first online BarCamp, especially for our remote audience. The session attracted 21 viewers, including 7 active and talkative participants! We had representatives from Washtenaw Community College, Michigan USA, University of Huddersfield, Heriot-Watt University, a former employee from the UK Centre for Legal Education, (now freelancing in Denmark!) and Oxford University.

We gathered in the event live blog, hosted through CoverItLive. This live blog has been active throughout the event, providing none-Twitter users with a channel to view the live commentary and delegate tweets, as well a facility to post their own comments and questions without the need for a login. Comments were moderated, as there was no obligation for people to identify themselves when making a comment.

For the BarCamp, I disabled the feed from the #iwmw10 hash tag, which effectively gave us a clear discussion space without the tweets from delegates in other BarCamp sessions. I invited participants to introduce themselves and to suggest topics of interest for discussion. As each person introduced themselves, I granted them unmoderated posting on an individual basis to enable freer flowing discussion.

The topic of most interest that seemed to evolve was the online course prospectus, with the discussion focussing on user testing, moving away from print and managing the politics of content contribution. There were some interesting experiences shared: including usability studies conducted by business students as part of their assessment process. The discussion then widened out to include the use of social media in the recruitment process – particularly the use of IM, which one participant had found substantially improved post-graduate recruitment.

The BarCamp also provided a useful opportunity to talk with the remote audience about their experiences of event amplification and to check how everything is going for them. They are apparently all waiting for a Gordon Brown moment when a speaker forgets they are being live streamed at the beginning or end of a presentation! We also have some useful feedback about requirements of certain institutional firewalls which have prevented access to the live video stream. Remote delegates were also able to build direct relationships and exchange contact details. The feedback from the BarCamp was very supportive, and their was an enthusiasm to see the talk archived for future reference and for other delegates to access the discussion.

Who are you?
Yvonne Aburrow

Where do you work and what do you do?
Web Developer at University of Bath Web Services, working on content, usability, information architecture and accessibility. http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/webservices/the-team/ may be of help here.

What are your main areas of interest?
Usability, information architecture and accessibility.

Are you working on anything exciting?
A Graduations website for the University.

Have you been to IWMW before?
No.

What has been the best bit about IWMW so far?
I really enjoyed Ranjit’s talk, which really challenged us to get real and start talking about the hard realities we need to embrace – which I think we all need at the moment.

What will you take away from the event?
I liked what Paul Boag was saying about sprints – and we are already doing this within my team. However, I think his point about removing out of date content was very good and I think we perhaps haven’t felt as empowered to do this before, so I was inspired by that.

What would be the impact on your institution if there were no IWMW?
This is my first year, so it is difficult for me to tell personally, but I have found it a very energising event, so I think without it we would all continue to do the “same old same old”.

Rich Kirk, Head of Online Marketing at Chameleon Net, discusses issues from his parallel session with Billy Fallows in this video interview…

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Owen Stephens summarises his parallel session: Flash Mash in this short video interview with Kirsty Pitkin…

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Lynda Bewley gives us her summary of the parallel session “Usability and User Experience on a Shoestring” presented by Stuart Church…
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This parallel session explored ways in which user experience methods could be made more cost-effective yet still provide tangible benefits.
Stuart started by asking the 18 delegates around the table for real-life examples of situations in which guerrilla usability testing methods would help their work. Common issues arising were that many web projects tended to be deadline-driven, leaving little time for user testing; usability decisions tended to be based on the knowledge of internal ‘experts,’ without any reference to a strong external evidence base. Some delegates found that design decisions were dictated by marketing teams as the ‘gatekeepers’ of the university’s external profile.

Stuart outlined some ways to adopt a more user-centred philosophy within an organisation, which included:

1.      User-Centred Design (UCD), which involves:

• Understanding the business and organisation
• Understanding the context of use – what are the success metrics of the site?
• Designing on the basis of this knowledge
• Evaluating the design
• Modifying based on evaluation/repeating the process

2.      Behaviour first. Design second.  If you understand people then design will naturally fall out of that. If you start with the technology then your site will be not be usable. This approach is ‘outside-in, not inside-out.’

3.      ‘The user is always right’, by Steve Mulder outlines the following five ideas:

• What are the business results for making your users happy?
• You are not your users
• Learn about your users by interacting with them
• Make the findings of your research understandable and actionable
• Design your site based on this knowledge

4.      ‘Emotional Design’ by Don Norman says that design is ‘Visceral’, ‘Behavioural’ and ‘Reflective’.

5.      ‘Rework’ by 37 signals. This book recommends creating a clear epicentre for design.

• Design the right thing
• Avoid feature creep
• Create a clear epicentre for design
• Focus on simplicity
• Deliver better return on investment

Stuart went on to outline some low-cost ‘guerrilla’ methods for user research and evaluation, which included:

1.      Usabilla: online ‘Micro usability tests’; low cost (free-$950); useful for preference and attitude testing, and analysis of simple tasks. Tests are based on screenshots and outputs include heat map overlays. Stuart performed a live demo which proved that setup time was less than 15 minutes.

2.       Loop11: remote task-oriented testing that runs on your live site. User self-reports on any difficulties they experience.

3.      Google Website Optimizer: A/B and multivariate testing that is free, simple and powerful; used to run ‘experiments’ to test specific hypotheses about designs. Requires well-defined goals/conversions; goes one step beyond analytics.

4.      Bipolar Emotional Response Tests (BERTS) or ‘semantic differential method’:  using a grid of ‘descriptors’ which users mark up to generate a quantifiable ‘emotional fingerprint’ of your site. Useful for benchmarking user perceptions against how stakeholders want a site to be perceived.

5.      System Usability Scale (SUS): a method of fast data collection, simple analysis, robust method, produces an overall score out of 100 for your site, useful for benchmarking.

6.      Websort: an online card sorting tool, $79 per study, used to inform or validate information architecture of site. This remote method is very useful for getting high numbers of responses and therefore meaningful results.  Can be used with an ‘open sort’ (no pre-defined categories) or a ‘closed sort’ where the categories are already defined.

7.      Skype: a free, large user base, great for remote research, audio/video and screen sharing.

8.      Ethnio: a user recruitment and management tool for setting up remote panels, $400 for the first 200 users, built-in screener. It can appear on your site as a pop-up or a direct link.