Presented at #PSEWEB by Ken Lane and Ryan Felgate

1. Creating Consistent Web
Experiences Across Faculties
Ryan Felgate – Associate Director, Digital Experience, Marketing
Ken Lane – Associate Director, Applications, IT
University of Calgary
July 8, 2019

2. Introductions
Ryan Felgate
Associate Director - Digital Experience,
Marketing
Experience: 14 years in tech and advertising
Likes: being organized, pizza, cats, dinosaurs
2
“It’s the internet, everything is possible”

3. Introductions
3
Ken Lane
Associate Director – Applications, Information Technology
Experience: 29 years in IT (Business Intelligence, Web, Applications)
8 years at the University of Calgary
Likes: Food, guitar, hockey

4. What’s this presentation about?
Agenda
• Getting Started
• Discovery
• Our Platform
• Supporting our Users
• Launch and Beyond
• Results
• Conclusion
• Questions
4

5. Getting Started

6. UCalgary Web Environment
6

7. Rebuilding: Phase 1
7

8. The Faculties
Create great user experience for our core academy: the faculties
We had a big problem with consistency:
• user experiences
• site flows
• content hierarchy
• information architecture and design
• … pretty much everything
8

9. But, we had an
opportunity

10. Discovery

11. The Discovery Process
Surveys and face to face meetings helped understand site goals and
objectives
• Future students
• Current students
• Alumni
• Faculty and staff
IT audited all faculty sites so we could understand existing functionality
All of these findings were synthesized to yield the following:
• Common goals of a typical faculty site
• Common key audiences for a typical faculty and their goals
• Commonly required features and functionalities
11

12. Future Students
Goal Touchpoints Pain points
Find the right program
for me at this institution
• Homepage and Future Students sites
• Faculty, Department, Program sites and
pages
• Academic Calendar
• Registrar
• Key information scattered across many pages
• Unfamiliar structures and jargon bar the way
• Inconsistent navigation and UI structures
between sites
Help me find the program I need, answer key
questions quickly, and help me compare.
Appendix 00

13. Current Students
Goal Touchpoints Pain points
Plan my degree with
course outlines,
completion
requirements
• Degree Guide site
• FGS, GSA, department GSA sites
• Faculty/Department/Program site
• Academic Calendar
• Email academic advising
• Talk to supervisor, professors
• Duplicated information – not sure which is the
most accurate or current
• Navigation is confusing and difficult to use
• “I just google it and bookmark the useful
pages.”
Make it easier to find accurate information and
access the help that’s available
Appendix 00

14. Faculty and Staff
Goal Touchpoints Pain points
Complete administrative
tasks
• My UCalgary
• IT site
• HR, Maps, SU Catering, etc. etc.
• Confusing processes and poor UI on tools like
My UCalgary, PeopleSoft, etc.
Support student needs • Faculty/dept sites across campus
• 3rd party academic institution sites
• Duplicated, out-of-date content
• Navigation is inconsistent and hard to use
Find information and complete tasks quickly,
easily, and consistently.
Appendix 00

15. Alumni
Goal Touchpoints Pain points
Be advocates • Share news and events with their network
(hosted on site, discovered via Newsletter,
social media)
• Lack of coverage of their area causes
disengagement
• Site feels old; not mobile friendly
Get involved (be
highlighted, have an
advisory role, join the
senate, etc.)
• Proactive invitation from Alumni team seems
necessary (after attending an event or
receiving news coverage)
• Unclear criteria for who gets invited causes
mistrust or disengagement
Inform and involve me by reaching out proactively.
Appendix 00

16. The Platform

17. The Design Process
RDLs (rapid design labs), so many RDLs
• Consistent navigation – 5 standard items and 2 wildcards
• Future Students, Current Students, Research, Contact, About
• Block’ library of ~20 carefully designed content blocks
• Additional key areas of functionality were discovered
• News
• Events
• Profiles
• Gated content (users to provide basic contact information to access content)
• Forms
• Surveys
17

18. Our Platform: Drupal
In 2017, it was announced that Drupal 7
would reach end-of-life in December 2019
• No more improvements, updates, or security patches
• 90% of UCalgary web properties were built on Drupal 7
• This made our decision to move to Drupal 8 simple
18

19. The Build Process
Minimum viable product (MVP) approach
• Move from waterfall projects to MVP releases
• Co-located front and back-end devs
• Design and development met daily
We needed development support
• Timelines meant we needed to hire an agency
• News platform MVP was built externally
19

20. Build or Buy
Build
• News - No good solution to buy, so we had to build a platform
• Profiles - UCalgary has a dated profiles system in place that we could use
• Forms - A free module exists in Drupal
Buy
• Events - LiveWhale met the majority of ours needs and was inexpensive
• Gated content - Marketo allows us to control content delivery with added benefits
• Surveys - Qualtrics is easy to use and very powerful
20

21. Supporting Users

22. Supporting Our Userbase
• Monthly web council
• Online training materials on https://web.ucalgary.ca
• Online community SharePoint
• Faculty leads roundtable
• In person training sessions
• Partnership with a trailblazing faculty
22

23. We partnered with the Faculty of Law
• Smaller faculty eager to make improvements to
their site
• We worked closely to update content and build all
the tools that they needed
• Allowed us to create a great example for other
faculties

24. Launch and Beyond

25. Launch and Beyond
Faculty web system MVP and law.ucalgary.ca launched in May 2018
• Ongoing significant improvement to the platform since then
• New Scrum process including a product backlog
• Ongoing consultation and input from faculties
All faculty sites will be live on the new platform by the end of this year
• Evolved the platform into the University Web System and all sites, not just faculty sites, will move by
the end of this year
25

26. Results

27. Qualitative Results
Consistent experiences across all web properties
Reduced number of pages saves time and effort
Streamlined tools reduced bugs and tech debt
27

28. Quantitative Results
40% reduction in the number of pages to maintain
30% increase in organic search traffic
40% improvement in page load times
40% reduction in bounce rate
6% increase in mobile traffic
18% increase in pages per session
28

29. Conclusion

30. Flexible Guardrails
30

31. Embrace Agile
Constantly improve our system
• When we started there was a lot of skepticism around our approach
• In the past, once our team released a feature it was never touched again until it was replaced
• We had to change people’s mindsets (our team included!)
• Scrum training
• Agile release process
• We tracked how new features were used and if they were successful
• We combined that usage data with user interviews to release improvements as often as possible
31

32. Transparency is key
Transparency made this system possible
• Web Council gave us a place to share our upcoming work and future plans
• It also gave our site creators a place to be heard and provide feedback
• We got the opportunity to highlight our wins
• … and our users got the chance to call us out on our mistakes
This open relationship built trust between Marketing, IT, and the
faculties
We built a culture of accountability and had a forum to maintain it
32

33. Build a Team
Make sure you’ve got the right roles
• User experience design
• User interface design
• Graphic system design
• Marketing and communications strategy
• Marketing technology
• Product owner/Scrum Master
• Business Analyst
• Development, both front end and back end
• QA testing
• Analytics
• Content strategy
33

34. Conclusion
Good things don’t come easy
34

35. Timelines of the Journey
35
2013 2022
2015 2016
Digital Experience
Formed
University Web
System Available
2017
Q3
2018 2019 20202014 2021
Project – Wave I
Development
Begins
Project – Wave I
Delivered
Wave I Discovery Wave II
Project – Wave II
Delivered
Transition from
Project to
IT Operations
Shift to Institutional Focus
From Site Provisioning to Delivering Capabilities
Reclamation of Sites
from external host and
retire relationship with
Pantheon
Retire Drupal 7
University Web System
Establish relationship
with Pantheon hosting
for ‘the new’
Dev Dev Dev
Decision to upgrade to
Drupal 8
Disparate Sites
Consistent Web Experiences
Law website
Delivered
IT Web Content
Management
Rebranded as
IT Web Services
Implement
re-architected on
premise infrastructure
All Faculties/Units
in Drupal 8
IT team relocated
with DE

36. Lessons Learned (from an IT perspective)
• What worked:
• Business readiness
• Relocating the IT Web Service Team to sit with Digital Experience proved to be a wise
move
• Challenges
• Completion of foundational technology
• The use of contractors led to a less than ideal use of coding standards
• One time funding model not sustainable
• Transition to operations
36

37. Questions?
Ryan Felgate – ryan.felgate@ucalgary.ca
Ken Lane – klan@ucalgary.ca

38. Appendix

39. What did we learn – Future Students
Goal Touchpoints Pain points
Find the right
program for me at
this institution
• Homepage and Future Students
sites
• Faculty, Department, Program sites
and pages
• Academic Calendar
• Registrar
• Key information scattered across
many pages
• Unfamiliar structures and jargon bar
the way
• Inconsistent nav and UI structures
between sites
Assess UCalgary’s
reputation
• Third party rating sites • Assume institution’s site will not tell
the whole story
Learn about
professors,
supervisors, and
research areas
• Future Students site
• Faculty, Department, Program sites
and pages
• Rate My Professor
• Difficult to find People pages
• Difficult to narrow the People list to
professors of interest to you
• Incomplete or low quality profiles
Start the
application process
• Future Students site
• Faculty, Department, Program sites
and pages
• Vague or missing CTAs from faculty,
department, program pages
• Application process explained on
faculty/dept/program page, then CTA
links to central “How to Apply”, telling
them again/showing a different process
Help me find the program I need, answer key questions quickly, and help me compare.

40. What did we learn – Current Students
Goal Touchpoints Pain points
Plan my degree
with course
outlines,
completion
requirements
• Degree Guide site
• FGS, GSA, department GSA sites
• Faculty/Department/Program site
• Academic Calendar
• Email academic advising
• Talk to supervisor, professors
• Duplicated information – not sure
which is the most accurate or current
• Navigation is confusing and difficult to
use
• “I just google it and bookmark the
useful pages.”
Complete
academic activities
and get academic
support
• D2L
• Library
• Professors, supervisors, advisors –
know them, or find via People pages
• Interactive Room Finder
• Student Success Centre
• Tough to get help if you don’t
already know who can provide it
• “Who is the right person to ask? I
resort to randomly emailing someone,
but I know that won’t get me far.”
Register for
courses, pay fees,
and other
administrative tasks
• My UCalgary
• Talk to administrators
• My UCalgary is hard to use; high stress
Find activities and
opportunities
• Word of mouth with profs, students
• Social media like Twitter, FB
• Posters, EBBs
• Newsletters: UToday, GSA
• “I don’t visit the UCalgary
homepage or main faculty page. I
go straight to my department site or
other sites I use frequently.”
Make it easier to find accurate information and access the help that’s available.

41. What did we learn – Faculty and Staff
Goal Touchpoints Pain points
Find the right
person to contact
• People pages, centrally and in
faculty or department sites
• Difficult to know who to contact,
especially staff, whose profiles are
less filled out, and have no photos.
Learn about
teaching and
learning
• Faculty/dept sites: course
descriptions and outlines; student
blogs, award recipients; news stories
• Taylor Institute website
• USRI site
• Can be tough to know what other
profs are doing in their classrooms
• More demonstrations of student
success and school spirit are desired
Support student
needs
• Faculty/dept sites across campus
• 3rd party academic institution sites
• Duplicated, out-of-date content
• Nav is inconsistent and hard to use
Complete research
related activities
• Library site
• Research-related sites (IRISS, OADM,
etc.)
• Faculty sites: research and grant
news stories and opportunities
• Confusing processes and poor UI
on tools like IRISS, OADM,
MyUCalgary, etc.
Complete
administrative tasks
• My UCalgary
• IT site
• HR, Maps, SU Catering, etc. etc.
• Confusing processes and poor UI
on tools like My UCalgary,
PeopleSoft, etc.
Find information and complete tasks quickly, easily, and consistently.

42. What did we learn - Alumni
Goal Touchpoints Pain points
Attend events • Email newsletter
• Social media like Twitter, Facebook
• Wayfinding: homepage, Room Finder
• Google it
• Difficult for those outside of Calgary
to participate, even in webinars due
to time zones
• Room finder is not mobile friendly
Learn about recent
developments
• Email newsletter
• Social media like Twitter, Facebook
• Stories hosted on web (UToday,
Alumni site, faculty/dept sites, etc.)
• Stale content on site – weeks to
months ago
• UToday / News / Events not mobile
friendly
Be advocates • Share news and events with their
network (hosted on site,
discovered via Newsletter, social
media)
• Lack of coverage of their area
causes disengagement
• Site feels old; not mobile friendly
Access benefits • Central Alumni site (via Google or
homepage)
• Benefits are most useful to those in
established careers and later life
stages
Get involved (be
highlighted, have
an advisory role,
join the senate,
etc.)
• Proactive invitation from Alumni
team seems necessary (after
attending an event or receiving
news coverage)
• Unclear criteria for who gets invited
causes mistrust or disengagement
Inform and involve me by reaching out proactively.