utexas.edu Refresh

Thank you to the 897 people who took our survey. We had a great response from staff, undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, alumni, parents, prospective students and the public. Thank you!

We will analyze the results and let you know what we learn in the coming months.

The Information Architecture (IA) cross-campus working group had its inaugural meeting last week.

The IA working group has been delegated responsibility for determining the information architecture for the university’s Web site at www.utexas.edu. The working group will define standards in information presentation for the university, determine the core site structure and define the core content.

Consisting of Web developers, publishers, knowledge-area experts and information architects across campus, the IA working group will meet weekly through mid-February 2010, conducting research, analyzing the results and then generating the information architecture products that will be shared with the design, content creation and content management system implementation groups.

The IA working group is assisting with research by gathering metrics and data about the existing Web site. Next steps for the group include exploring the information needs of the university community by identifying user personas and tasks. During and after the research phase, the group will help analyze the results to provide summaries for the Refresh Committee to review and comment on.

Using the committee’s comments, along with the user personas, user task analysis and research results analysis, the group will define the information architecture for the university’s Web site and recommend solutions that meet the information needs of the community. The group then will prepare the final products of the working group: a site diagram, page description diagrams and wireframes. These products will be presented to the Refresh Committee for discussion, revisions and final approval.

The research:

• Surveys
• Focus Groups
• Interviews
• Peer Site Reviews
• Usability Studies
• Content Inventories
• Urchin Metrics

The IA working group products:

• User Personas
• Task Analyses
• Site Diagram
• Page Description Diagrams
• Wireframes

Our process has already proven to be a positive opportunity to engage webmasters and stakeholders across campus, and we value the opportunities for feedback and communication here.  Feel free to let us know if you have any questions or any input to contribute. Thanks!

We need your input to help improve the university’s Web site. Make use of this opportunity to tell us your thoughts and ideas. Please take our 10-minute survey:

Visit the Refresh Survey on Survey Monkey

The survey closes Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009. Thanks!

There have been some questions about the scope of the changes to take place in UT Direct during the 2009-2010 Refresh.  This entry is meant to address those questions and clarify the scope of the changes to UT Direct.

The Refresh effort in UT Direct will focus on branding revisions to the header, footer, and navigation spaces that currently exist in UT Direct.  The tabbed landing pages (ie. My Classes, My Bookmarks, etc.) will be included in these revisions.  The UT Direct API call structure, semantic structure, and block layout, where possible, will not be changed.

The following table distinguishes between what will and will not be updated in UT Direct as part of the 2009-2010 Refresh:

As you can see, most of the changes will pertain to the ‘look and feel’ of the UT Direct framework.  It may be necessary to modify some aspects of the API, semantic structure, or block layout of content within UT Direct.  However, we will do our best to avoid changing those areas and any changes that must be made will be small and communicated to the UT Direct developer community far in advance of the implementation process.

It might be helpful to look at some pictures to understand the anticipated changes more clearly.  Please note that no design decisions have been made; the pictures below are meant only to demonstrate what aspects of the UT Direct framework will change.  This is not a representation of the new design.

Below is an image of a current UT Direct service.  Note the styles of the Header, Footer, Left Navigation,Tabs, and Subnav section:

Here is an example of a UT Direct service with a more ‘modern’ look and feel.  Notice that the block layout of the page is essentially the same but the styles of some of the sections above have been updated.  For example, color and font palettes have changed in the Left Navigation area, the sample Subnav style has been updated, and inline font has been modified.

Finally, design constraints have been developed by the UT Direct stewards.  The constraints listed below must be adhered to and will inform the work of the design team during the design phase of the Refresh project:

• The header must not be larger than it already is, must remain in the same location.
• The footer must not be larger than it already is, must remain in the same location.
• The Left Navigation Menu must remain the same size and in the same location.
• The Business Utilities box must remain the same size and in the same location.
• The size of the Content div must not be smaller than it already is.
• The Sub-navigation menu must be made available and be no larger than it is. However, there are few constraints on location.
• The Page Title must not be larger than it already is.
• All links in the header (Search, UT Home, Sitemap, UT Direct Help, Logoff) must still be available.
• The help and bookmark links must still be offered to developers through the API.

We hope this entry has clearly outlined the scope of the UT Direct Refresh, but let us know if you have any questions or need further clarification.

We are now in the third phase of our Content Management System (CMS) selection process for the Refresh project. To recap our progress so far…

Phase 1 was the development of a Selection Criteria Matrix that we would use to rate our initial seven candidates. These seven candidates were (in alphabetical order):

• DjangoCMS
• Drupal
• ExpressionEngine
• Joomla!
• Oracle Universal Content Management System
• Plone
• WordPress

Phase 2 was the completion of the selection matrix for all seven candidates, followed by selection of a short list of three finalists. At the end of this phase, we decided on the following three finalist candidates (again, in alpha order):

• Drupal
• ExpressionEngine
• Plone

Phase 3 is in progress and will end with the selection of a CMS product for the Refresh project.

We have built on the work done on the Phase 1 Selection Criteria Matrix to develop a list of requirements (PDF) for the CMS, including rationales for each requirement, and fit criteria that we can use to directly evaluate each of our finalist packages against the requirements.

Our schedule is to complete Phase 3 and announce our selection in this space by mid-November. We have also scheduled another FYI presentation to discuss the selection and answer any questions about the process. This is scheduled for Dec. 2, 9-10 a.m. in Burdine 220. We hope to see you there!

Supporting Documents

CMS Evaluation Matrix

CMS Requirements/Rationale/Fit Criteria

Just wanted to post our revised evaluation matrix for CMS selection, which incorporates some good commentary from our developer community.  The Refresh team is using this matrix to review our initial list of candidates, and plan to have a short list of finalists determined within the next two weeks.

Revised CMS Evaluation Matrix

Tomorrow (Wednesday, September 30) I’ll be presenting an overview of the Refresh effort as part of the FYI program for the campus IT community.  The FYI will be held from 9:00-9:50 in BUR 220.

Hope to see you there!

The Refresh team’s been working on our criteria for selecting a content management system (CMS) for Web Central, and have a draft that we’d like to share.

We’ve scoped our goals fairly conservatively: the CMS we are looking to implement will serve core pages within the www.utexas.edu directory structure, and is not intended to be a enterprise CMS solution for campus.  By keeping our focus tight, we hope to quickly implement a solution that will serve the core pages of Web Central by next year.

Our initial candidates for CMS selection are:

• DjangoCMS
• Drupal
• ExpressionEngine
• Joomla!
• Oracle Universal Content Management System (OUCMS)
• Plone
• WordPress

We’ll be doing an initial review of these systems and then choosing a short list of finalists for deeper analysis.

We welcome your feedback on our criteria and candidates, and will consider in our revisions any input submitted by September 28th.

On September 15, we formally began the Refresh process in an official meeting with the Refresh committee.  The Refresh committee includes representatives from constituencies across campus:

• Colleges and Schools
• Division of Continuing and Innovative Education
• Faculty
• Graduate Students
• Information Technology Services
• Intercollegiate Athletics for Men and Women
• Office of Admissions
• Office of Development
• Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost
• Office of the Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
• Office of the Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement
• Office of the Vice President for Public Affairs
• Office of the Vice President for Research
• Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs
• Staff
• Texas Exes
• Undergraduate Students
• University of Texas Libraries
• University Operations

During the meeting, the Office of Public Affairs and the ITS Web Team presented an overview of our goals, our process, the role of the Refresh Committee, and our next steps for moving forward.  The presentation is available here.

We’ll be meeting with the Refresh committee monthly throughout the process, and are looking forward to working with them as we move forward.

The university’s Web presence is scheduled for a redesign. This will be a major undertaking by the Office of Public Affairs and the ITS Web Technologies Team, and we are excited to take this first step by creating a place where we can share our thoughts, ideas, findings, designs, and more.

We are just now beginning to formalize this redesign, but we’ve been pondering the need for a refresh for a while.  An ad-hoc committee began meeting several months ago to discuss the possibilities. Still in the discovery phase, those discussions revolved around:

• How can we improve the university’s Web presence?
• What are the primary goals of the site?
• Who are our target audiences?

What are the next steps?

We’re now ready to begin. In the coming weeks, we’ll be finalizing the project charter and forming the Refresh committee, an advisory group that will oversee the redesign process.  Following that, we’ll form working groups to gather data, conduct usability studies, define the standards to which we want to adhere, investigate content management solutions, and design and implement the site.

This refresh will be a lot of work, but we are anxious to start.  The official launch will come after our Refresh committee has assembled, but we’ll update this blog regularly to keep you posted.

Read more about the refresh and our vision for community involvement.

And stay tuned for more!