University web marketing and usability

Alright, I know that this is old news for most people who read this, but I have to talk about it for reasons of completion.

The University of California, Berkeley has put over 200 (!!!) videos on YouTube and created a dedicated page for their institution on the no. 1 video sharing site on the internet:

University of California, Berkeley on YouTube

Apart from the odd marketing video, most of these pieces are recorded lectures. So this is for current students only… or is it?

Have a look at the feedback on the left side: people are praising those efforts in the highest voices! Of course. If my university did the same, I would also be pretty euphoric, but we all know that universities are very slow movers when it comes to video production. And then having the guts to not only put a couple of videos on, but over 200 to start with… great stuff! At the point of writing, they have 6,571 subscribers and 851,608 channel views. I hope that nobody dares to argue with those numbers.

Let’s talk about the target audiences:

Future students - can see what studying at UCB is like, get acquainted with the lecturers, can check out the vibes –> manages to get this elusive “student life” message across beautifully

Current students - don’t have to go to lectures but can download it, or can watch it again after attending the lecture, as a quick refresher. Also a great document for little arguments like “But you said that…”

Parents - get convinced easily that they are not simply wasting their money by sending their kids to UCB

Wider community - very prestigious first move into this new educational space, and therefore a lot of media attention and “Me too!” reaction.

Yes, I am jealous…

In our team, we recently had a discussion about text resizing widgets and their pros and cons. I was somewhat shocked when I encountered fierce opposition again the introduction for those little helpful buttons - they were supposed to be harmful!

All I can say is: I don’t think so!

Some claim that people would use those little widgets instead of resizing the text with their browser. Now that would be bad. How could users dare not to know how to use their browsers? I ask in return: how dare we to assume that people want to know that kind of stuff? Yes, I know, we could make this world a better place if people knew of all those little gadgets their browsers have… or are there maybe people who have other things to do?

I would understand the whole argument if those widgets were a hindrance - for example a big fat button right in the middle of the screen. However, they are the exact opposite: they are tiny little add-ons, conveniently and unobtrusively located at the end or beginning of a main content area.

A few helpful links:

Resizing text and confidence - “isolani” summarizes beautifully why some people might have a problem with browsers in general.

Text size widgets - quite useful actually - “Grant Broome” argues that showing people how to do the resizing might be great, but there is no harm done in making it easier for them on the page

… and for people who want to show a little video on how resizing can be done:

Teach a Man how to Fish (or how to Resize Text)

I am still absolutely confused why people who want to maximise usability and accessibility would not want to use these little helpers. Any ideas?

Scott Berkun delivered the opening keynote for the second day of the conference, and he had just the right mix of humour and facts to get an otherwise rather sleepy crowd kicked off to another exciting day. The title of his speech “The Myths of Innovation” is based on his latest book with the same name.

Scott’s main message: when it comes to innovations, our society focusses entirely on “moments of epiphany”, where supposedly a scientist or general thinker suddenly had an idea that would change the world. While we even create our own myths to support this “theory”, we completely neglect the importance of years of boring research and calculations, or the necessity of failure to learn from our mistakes, to finally reach a point where an innovation becomes usable.

He went through several examples of such myths, only to later show evidence that something like this had actually never happened. Newton’s accident with an apple dropping on his head to discover th theory of gravity, Archimedes’ bath tub discovery of how to measure the volume of a gold crown - all these stories are myths, invented to conjure this moment of epiphany that we so cherish. Another component of that myth is that things are happening to us that trigger a thought process, making scientist look like victims of circumstances. However, in reality one would identify a problem and then set on to solve it, with many frustrations, failures and delays on the way. To prove this point, he showed the grand Roman buildings that had lasted literally for millennia - only to tell us that all the crappy wooden buildings they had built had simply crumbled, and only the best ones had remained. Again, failure on the way that is now being ignored by our society while we hail the Romans as the best builders of ancient history.

Scott then developed his argument, saying that the word “innovation” itself is somewhat tainted, and in his experience, the less people used it, the more actually happened.

After pointing out all those weird phenomena of our society (and I really do whole-heartedly agree with him on all his points), he then gave us a few points for what to do to create an environment in companies to nurture innovation:

1.) Delegate: let employees go down different paths, even if it might not be entirely related to your core product

2.) Take risks / make mistakes: one of his examples here were all the failed rocket launches in the American space program - with each failure giving absolutely valuable data to the scientists, making failures successful. This also means that there should be a culture that does not judge by the failures that one makes.

3.) Reward initiative: tell employees that it is in fact okay to go and do something else, and that there is a pot of gold in the distance that they could get.

At the very end, Scott pointed out the surprising history of the company 3M, which started out as a mining company, but later went on and invented sand paper and masking tapes. And the one paragraph that William McKnight (later CEO of the company) is famous for, I would really like to share with you as an inspiration:

As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

Scott pointed out that new ideas always spark emotional responses that need to be dealt with. One way would be to include stakeholders that would be affected by the change (in a positive environment). If the environment was rather adversary, he suggested to delegate specific people for specific predicted problems. And maybe, when the product or idea is mature enough and successfully bringing lots of money in, go about creating a story to underline the moment of epiphany

Conclusion

I think Scott Berkun really touched something there, and I have to admit that creating a culture of innovation is something that public institutions don’t seem to be particularly good at. However, modern examples like Google, who give their employees 20% of their time at their own disgression, show that such concepts will nurture an environment that will put you at the top. And I think this is relevant for all industries, but especially for higher education!

Cameron Adam’s presentation and talk on web-based interfaces was certainly one of the highlights of this conference. I attended his session last year and was very impressed with the ease with which he came up with new ideas and coded them without any further ado. He did not disappoint me this year. To find more about him, read his blog “The Man in Blue“.

Cameron said that it was not really a new idea any more to customise content for your users (which doesn’t mean it’s a bad one, it’s just not cutting edge any more): Amazon is probably the most prominent user of that principle. However, as he pointed out, the future was in the LAYOUTS to be customised for or by your user (I will come to the difference in a minute). This is not a revelation that might sweep people away, but Cameron’s observations and advice was very helpful.

He portrayed the interface design of a web site as one particular point, on a vast spectrum of user preferences. As layouts are mostly static, it is not possible to cater for the needs and wants of everyone, you can only try to place your particular design on the spectrum so that it caters for (hopefully) a majority of users. With dynamic interfaces, you can in fact cover a whole RANGE on that spectrum, which would obviously cater for more users.

Of course, this is not useful for all web sites: in fact, he showed that the usefulness of customisation on a site increased with the frequency of use. Also, they were more useful for sites that offered a service (web applications) than for web sites that invite to browse.

Customisation by the user

His initial example was MySpace, but he immediately pointed out that the customisation was too hard for 99% of the users, and therefore mostly turned pretty ugly. He also pointed out that besides all that customisation, it would be useful if sites could retain some basic branding (like Facebook). Flickr started to offer some sort of choice in terms of customisation, but only on a very small scale. However, even that choice is already enough for the web admins to analyse user patterns (which I think in itself is already hugely useful). A web site that offers much more than that is NetVibes: its purpose is to bring together feeds and let the users re-arrange them, just like iGoogle (only more concentrated on social networking apps). Even the biggest search providers now offer similar features: Google offers searchmash, and Yahoo! offers alpha. Have a look and play around with it a little

An observation he made is a standard model for interface design: there is a gap between the way content is offered on a web site, and the mental model that users have when they approach it. It is of course the aim of every designer to make this gap as small as possible, and customisation can certainly help a great deal there.

Customisation by analysis

In this second approach, the web site gathers data from the users to change the interface for users, without them actively doing anything but interacting with the content. A rather obvious example for this would be a web site that resets the interface if users visit it with different screen resolutions, something that is fairly easy to do, and that could create neat effects. Please be aware that I am not talking about liquid layouts here, Cameron actually presented a Javascript solution for this problem. Cameron pointed out the advantages of CSS3 for this, have a look at his example.

A more powerful example is the BBC web site that (at least in parts of it) makes the background of blocks of information more salient if users have used it often in the past. Thus, by simply looking at something repeatedly, it will stand out (very neat, I find).

Cameron’s conclusion

Cameron calls this “the cream on top” - he suggests that you get the basics of the web site working first, your content right, and so on, and THEN you should think about something like this. He also says that the actual design process will be much tougher if you make it customisable for users, as you have to cater for many more scenarios. And his final piece of advice was to look up the Google Web Toolkit to make programming easier.

I think I might have to warn that this post is a little critical. I do not doubt that Raoul Vera is a very competent and highly dedicated Google employee with a lot of great ideas. However, I do doubt that it was a smart move to let him make this presentation. He admitted himself right from the start that he didn’t know much about all the Google products, as he had only been working there for two months. And whenever he did know something, he said that he was told not to disclose anything. Problem is of course that these little bits of info would be the really interesting things.

What we as attendees were left with was a mix of pointing out handy mashups, and going through really basic Javascript code to put those mashups on pages. It was clearly a techie session, but even for me without a strong coding background, the coding shown was really simple, and would have been very easy to look up on Google’s help pages.

Anyway, Raoul talked about the idea Google Maps and possible mashups.  In a nutshell, mashups use several datasources and try to achieve an increase in information content. He showed 4 examples:

1.) The New York subway system
2.) The London subway system
3.) Race distribution in the USA
4.) Australian electorates

He then talked about Google’s commitment to KML, whch stands for Keyhole Markup Language. This language is specialised on geographical data, and is absolutely fixed.

Raoul’s passion definitely was the closing gap between constructs in cyberspace (like web sites) and in the real world. One might think of data that is being sent to your mobile depending on where you are in a city… however, I found he failed to portray these ideas as a monumental change that I seem them as, because of the way it will change our perception of the web. Just imagine that you surf the web, and you get a sense of place because you have certain markers that you could connect with in the place you live. And with the latest products of Nokia, with integrated GPS, it’s not so hard to imagine that people can locate other people in the real world, by checking their position on something like Google Maps. Again, he didn’t really say that…  it was left to everybody’s imagination what to do with this.

I apologize for not getting more out of this.

This is my first report from the Web Directions South Conference 2007 that is currently taking place in Sydney. 

Rashmi Sinha’s presentation “The Perils of Popularity”

I won’t waste any time on introducing Rashmi, she herself does a good enough job on that one, hehehe! Have a look at Rashmi’s blog.

I think she was a very good speaker to kick off the conference, offering the right mix of easy entertainment and often deeply conceptual and inspirational content. She talked about social spaces on the web, and portrayed some very interesting observations.

1.) People on the internet meet over objects. For example, Flickr as a community works so well, because their photographs give them something to talk about, something that they can connect over. My personal observation of Second Life agrees with this: I think that a reason why Second Life never really took off after the hype was that people just had no real reason to interact in that space.

2.) The Facebook phenomenon is interesting as it only facilitates meeting, but basically lets other companies provide the objects over which people can meet. I am personally not entirely sure if that is correct. I find that the social experiences that people had with others in real life could be seen as the objects over which to connect in Facebook. Yes, things like the Rock-paper-scissors Roshambull application, or the Drinks application also offer some sort of object to some extent, but I do not perceive them as the core of Facebook.

3.) The successful internet phenomena consist of three interacting concepts:
     The graph (which is more or less the actual crowd of people)
     The object (the thing people can connect over)
     The place (the actual facility that people use to hang out on the internet)

4.) She made a very interesting point when she compared Digg with Flickr. Digg encourages mob mentality, where only the material that has proven to be hugely popular floats to the surface. That means that users put stuff up simply for the reason of getting to the top. Flickr on the other hand supports individualism, as people mostly upload material that they personally find interesting, not caring so much about the potential of being that this sought after first page… There was a smart question from the audience after this, asking for a value statement about which one was “better”. Of course there was no answer, but Rashmi pointed out that one has to be careful when establishing new online communities: which behaviour do you want to encourage, and how do you have to treat “success” in these environments?

5.) She had another comparison, which was sort of similar: YouTube with Facebook. And again we see this mob mentality in YouTube, where success comes from being praised by the masses, whereas Facebook doesn’t seem to have a “success” definition at all.

When the floor was opened up to questions, one asked how owners of such systems should react if they see that users tried to cheat the system to float to the top. She emphasized strongly that there was a strong need to remain agile in the decisions, and be able to make quick decisions to avoid disaster. However, she also said that it was important to remember that it was also important to hand over at least part of the control (or the dynamics, I find) of such spaces to the users, to simply see how they want to use the facilities. Coming from a university web background, I found this point very important, as our institutionalized channels of decision-making are painfully slow, and would not perform so well with these levels of required flexibility.

Overall, a very good presentation, and I will be watching her blog for more input!

There are not that many good conferences about web issues in general in Australia. Luckily, at least we have Web Directions South, hehe. This conference starts in 9 hours, and of course I will be there! However, I won’t kill myself to get reports up 5 minutes after each presentation has ended. I will take notes, then go home, mull them over, sleep a little, bum around on Facebook, and THEN I will write down my thoughts.

Thus: expect this place to discuss the latest stuff from the conference, but don’t expect it to do that before anybody else has done so I’m just human after all!

As part of my job, I go through the web sites of all universities in Sydney a few times per year, simply to see that not much has changed, to see whether they are embarking on any new trends that we (UTS) haven’t spotted yet, and also as a normal benchmarking exercise. The last time I got swept off my feet with a new development was when I spotted Macquarie University’s MQTV last year. Today, it happened again, and again it was Macquarie University to achieve that. It is probably helpful for you to know that I am NOT employed by Macquarie but by a competitor

 On 12 September 2007, Macquarie University launched an entire web site for their Vice Chancellor:

Website of Professor Schwartz, Vice Chancellor of Macquarie University

Before I go into detail, I have to say two things: Kudos to a VC who puts himself out there and provides so much interesting material, and Kudos to a web team for another job well done!

The design of the web site is within the normal confines of MQ’s template, but with all the web 2.0 gimmicks installed, it gets a nice light-weight ultra-modern look and feel. The navigation is kept small, and the “quick links” on the right are a cute idea, again giving one the feeling that the creators knew how to draw in a web 2.0 crowd.

If you are now expecting to enter a realm of long and boring reports, you will be VERY surprised: the site boasts plenty of well-produced videos, with very neat Flash navigation, in a section called “Words, pictures, and more“. The technical quality and also the interesting content make them fun and informative to watch. Obviously, MQ used their expertise from their MQtv web site to make this look very consistent.

Users can also listen to streamed audio of very high quality, and download slideshows. The fact that all the resulting pop-up windows are produced in Flash shows that MQ seems to have made the decision to throw off the shackles of constrained web design on university web sites, to deliver a great user experience to its visitors. I am certainly very appreciative of that, hehe!

The site has plenty more to offer, like speeches, press releases, reports and so on (the stuff that everybody would expect). However, the most surprising thing on this whole site is the VC blog! The site is still very young, so it remains to be seen if MQ’s VC has enough time to keep it updated, but the two articles he has posted so far are interesting and entertaining. He speaks to “the world” in normal language, embracing the fact of equality amongst web users. To me, it seems that this is a VC who understands how to use the web to his advantage, certainly more believable than Kevin Rudd or John Howard would ever be able to do it!

In the press release, Schwartz says “The website exists for three main reasons,” Professor Schwartz explains. “Firstly, social media tools like blogs and podcasts are obviously popular and effective ways of communicating. I’ll continue to host regular face-to-face meetings, but there’s no better way for me to reach all 31,000 Macquarie University students and 2,000 staff - and to hear what they have to say - than to do it over the Web. ”

As an envious competitor, I can only say: Very well done!

This is of course by far not an exhaustive list of ideas, but I thought, if you’re struggling with keeping a Facebook group for a higher education entity (school, faculty, whatever) going, you might as well try some of these:

Orientation days/weeks

One week before the beginning of each semester, we have our new international students arrive. They get a nice welcome on our campus, tours, and lots of fun activities. At some point, we grab them and talk to them a little about our web site, and that’s the point where we introduce our Facebook group. The response is usually quite mixed: students from non-English speaking countries often haven’t heard about it because their home countries use different applications for the same purpose. Others seem surprised that university students would waste their time on such a space. We find the inclusion of international students into our Facebook group a very important facet - often, these students struggle to get in touch with the local crowd, or they don’t hear of events early enough. By being part of this group, they can contact people they have met over the Orientation week and organise activities (which really works), and they can also read our posted events. On the less noble side, I am the first one to admit that it is a fantastic opportunity for our marketing efforts as well: imagine - all these people from different countries bring their Facebook contacts with them! Thus, people from Canada, the US, Germany, the UK and many more can read about what’s going on over there in Down Under, and hopefully think “Wow, this sounds like fun, I want to go there, too!” (and spend those precious imported dollars, hehe).

The merchandise

Very early in the process we had the idea of creating business card-like handouts to ask people to join us. We can now not only hand them out to students who have already joined our Faculty, but also at our Information Days to potential students! Again, imagine - a 17-year-old girl (our main target audience and standard persona for our strategies) comes up to our stall and thinks “Hm, I’m not so sure, I am kind of insecure about the whole uni thing: what will it be like? Will I get along with my fellow students? And isn’t uni really boring anyway?” and then somebody gives you a funky little card to invite you to a group of your favourite social space on the internet. Come on, you have to admit, that’s a pretty smart idea Not only will they give us credit that we are using such a trendy space to build our community, they also have the most authentic display of how our students interact with each other and can fit right in!

Events advertising

A quick example: we tried to organize a standard alumni event recently, and applications were really low, around 20 or so. We sent off a quick email to one of our “cyber-SPROUTS” (read previous post on what that means) to put up an event and send out invitations (to increase authenticity, we usually make students do that for us). That was only 2 days before the event. And on the night over 70 people showed! This shows the direct impact this type of advertising can have. And it works twice as much for you: you get people to come to your event, but you also get members of your Facebook group to check the space regularly because there is a real incentive there.

Spin-offs

Once your main group has reached a critical mass of people, you can decide to create spin-offs if this hasn’t already been done by the students themselves. We have advertised Facebook amongst our academics for quite some time now, and some of them have joined and are beginning to discover this space for themselves. I have just been approached recently by one of our younger Doctors, and she now runs a pretty active spin-off concentrating on her program area within the Faculty.

Do you have any other ideas of how to keep the swing going in your Facebook group? Please let me know, I will be very interested to hear about it! 

Oh boy, it’s been a looooooooooong time…

Let’s just pretend that this huge break didn’t happen What I would like to talk about today is a bit of a show and tell of our faculty (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney) effort to start a Facebook group. Please bear in mind that a faculty is a much smaller unit than a university, in our case chronically underfunded, and subject to all sorts of political pressures. This is my way of saying “If we find any corners to cut - man, do we cut them!”. If you are already running a Facebook group for your institution, well, read through this post and chuckle a little. If you aren’t running one, I am sure that you will find our current experience quite helpful.

Reasons for creating a Facebook group

We made many attempts in the past to create any sense of online community for this, and I have to admit: they were all terrible failures. It usually started with a lot of work in preparation of an online presence, like a discussion forum, a web gallery, and so on. Then there was usually a launch party… 2 months later the pictures of that party got loaded up… and then it died…

MySpace and Facebook offered something that we were looking for: an audience of people who were ALREADY online, spending hours per week or even per day surfing around for something that might catch their eye. Quick searches revealed that a healthy number of our students was already inhabiting these spaces! That was at the end of 2006. By then, we could already see how the tide had started to turn against MySpace in the USA, usually a very good indicator that this development would hit Australia around 6-12 months later. We were also not at all impressed by the MySpace search, or the loading time. Therefore we decided to go for Facebook.

We wanted to create a community that we could monitor from the background, to see what our students were really thinking. We also wanted to create a space where we could  put out messages on a more informal level than our web site. And last but certainly not least, we wanted to entice POTENTIAL students to join our group to see what the HSS student community was like, and then of course sign up to study with us!

Attempt 1: Let’s create a fake entity - bad idea

Let’s just pretend that I never did that It’s illegal! Facebook states quite clearly in their terms of use that entities and units are not allowed to sign up pretending that they were a person. All they are allowed to do is to have an employee of that entity or unit create a group for others to join. Although this made it a bit harder for us, I really do appreciate this line, as it doesn’t dilute the overall concept of Facebook.

Attempt 2: Alright, here is my group! Join, please?

I had signed up to Facebook months before, but never really used it. Unexperienced as I was, I went forth and created a group called “UTS Humanities and Social Sciences”. The bait was out. Nothing happened. And after a few weeks, still nothing had happened! Weren’t our students jumping at the chance to be with us? Apparently not… after 4 weeks, we had 6 members in this group, and 5 of them were HSS employees who I kind of forced to create an account. I tried to create a few good discussion threads, created a logo, put something on the wall, but all to no avail. What was I doing wrong?

Enlightenment!

Then it struck me: I was a fake! Here I was, in a space mainly inhabited by high school or university students, and I wasn’t one of them, I was a graduate! And not even from that faculty! When I realised that, I scoured through some of the more successful groups, and I realised that they smelled real. The community really had something to talk about, there was a common purpose, there was light-weight fun conversation. AUTHENTICITY was the key!

Attempt 3: Get real students to do it for you - success!

Once this realization had hit me, it was clear that I needed a few “real” students to get this community going. I sifted through the “interest” fields in the UTS network, and quickly narrowed my search down to three students. My supervisor was really happy about the idea, and also coined our much-loved term “Cyper-SPROUTS” (SPROUTS stands for Student rePResentatives Of UTS… please don’t judge them by the awkward acronym!). We met up with these students and discussed a code of conduct. Our mission for them was basically to use their already established Facebook presence to invite all their friends who studied at our Faculty, and then convince them to invite all THEIR friends, and so on…

We also discussed topics to discuss on the discussion boards with them, and how they were supposed to entice their fellow students to share their experiences on “The Wall” (if you don’t know what “The Wall” means, it’s time for you to join Facebook!). Then we let them loose - and within 4 weeks we had over 100 students in the group! Mind you, that was in a time when Facebook was still in its infancy in Australia, so we were ecstatic Ever since, our group has experienced steady growth, and is now at over 210 members at the time of writing.

In my next post I will be writing about how we keep this group alive and growing.