The document discusses strategies for improving a complex university website. It recommends appointing a small group of experts to be in charge, communicating regularly with stakeholders, creating a shared vision and goals, conducting an audit and analysis, and establishing standards, roles, workflows and accountability. The goal is to develop a user-friendly website through a collaborative process that puts users' needs first.
Content Strategy in Action: Taming a 5,000 Page Franken-siteRebecca Blakiston
Learn how a band of fearless library professionals are ripping the guts out of their website using content strategy.
When we started this project in early 2014, the University of Arizona Libraries website was a monster—5,000 unwieldy web pages of outdated, irrelevant, and unfriendly content. After sorting through all of the squishy entrails captured in our content audit, we left the lab to learn about our users and stakeholders—their needs, expectations, and priorities. With data in hand, we decided what content to kill and bury, what could be resurrected, and how to focus our content efforts going forward.
We are now working with a dozen content managers to revamp the web pages they hold dear and make our content more human. To keep the beast at bay, we are creating a system of workflows, standards, and accountability and giving our managers the training and tools they need to be successful.
Presented by Rebecca Blakiston and Shoshana Mayden at edUi 2014 in Richmond, Virginia, September 30th.
LOEX 2009 - Developing an Online Credit-Bearing Information Fluency Course: L...Rebecca Blakiston
Presentation from LOEX 2009 in Albuquerque, NM. Titled "Developing an Online Credit-bearing Information Fluency Course: Lessons Learned." Presented by Rebecca Blakiston,Yvonne Mery, and Leslie Sult, Undergraduate Services Librarians from the University of Arizona.
Keynote presentation delivered online as part of Library Journal's Digital UX Workshop: Crafting Exceptional Digital Experiences for the User-Centered Library. November 3, 2015.
Content Strategy in Action: Taming a 5,000 Page Franken-siteRebecca Blakiston
Learn how a band of fearless library professionals are ripping the guts out of their website using content strategy.
When we started this project in early 2014, the University of Arizona Libraries website was a monster—5,000 unwieldy web pages of outdated, irrelevant, and unfriendly content. After sorting through all of the squishy entrails captured in our content audit, we left the lab to learn about our users and stakeholders—their needs, expectations, and priorities. With data in hand, we decided what content to kill and bury, what could be resurrected, and how to focus our content efforts going forward.
We are now working with a dozen content managers to revamp the web pages they hold dear and make our content more human. To keep the beast at bay, we are creating a system of workflows, standards, and accountability and giving our managers the training and tools they need to be successful.
Presented by Rebecca Blakiston and Shoshana Mayden at edUi 2014 in Richmond, Virginia, September 30th.
LOEX 2009 - Developing an Online Credit-Bearing Information Fluency Course: L...Rebecca Blakiston
Presentation from LOEX 2009 in Albuquerque, NM. Titled "Developing an Online Credit-bearing Information Fluency Course: Lessons Learned." Presented by Rebecca Blakiston,Yvonne Mery, and Leslie Sult, Undergraduate Services Librarians from the University of Arizona.
Keynote presentation delivered online as part of Library Journal's Digital UX Workshop: Crafting Exceptional Digital Experiences for the User-Centered Library. November 3, 2015.
Design Thinking for the Masses: Creating a Culture of Empathy Across a Librar...Rebecca Blakiston
Design thinking puts users at the forefront. It encourages us to practice empathy, observe our surroundings, question assumptions, and identify big problems. It then asks us to prototype and iterate on solutions. Inspired by the power of these concepts, University of Arizona Libraries initiated a library-wide design thinking project. This inclusive, collaborative effort guided strategic initiatives and put user experience in the minds of library employees at all levels.
Presentation at Designing for Digital 2018 in Austin, Texas.
Presentation by Rebecca Blakiston, America Darling Curl, and Lara Miller at the University of Arizona IT Summit 2019. October 29 in Tucson, AZ.
Website content is often hidden behind cumbersome menus. How can we better label, organize, and design navigation so users can find what they need? Learn two information architecture techniques for a better user experience: card sorts for creating categories, and tree testing for identifying navigation paths.
Webinar workshop for LibraryLinkNJ. Covers the various types of web copy libraries create, as well as thinking about audience and how people read on the web. Discussion of voice and tone, including the importance of being conversational, honest and kind. Essential tips for high impact writing such as structure, writing for scannability, good use of links and avoiding jargon.
Framing content as a touchpoint, this talk discusses the ways and states in which users arrive at library content. It covers the various types of web copy libraries create and strategies to approach each with empathy, plus thinking about voice and tone.
Fast, Cheap, and Actionable: Creating an Affordable User Research Program (Th...Michael Powers
Done a usability study? Ready for the next step? Today we have an abundance of fast, affordable user research methods, many of which can be done remotely with real users. Learn about available user research options and how one university runs successful research projects that lead to actionable insights.
Presentation for the UX Unconference held at the University of Arizona Libraries, December 6th, 2013. Video recording of the presentation available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzG1G9gpTVU.
Using your Voice to Amplify Your Career
Lunch and Learn Series: QCRI Summer Intern Programme
Presented at Qatar Computing Research Institute
May 14, 2015
Topics include: how to use your data and research to build your audience and network, managing your career development, building your professional network, how to public speak and locating mentors
We get it. Our website is a process, not a project. Without a content plan redesign projects are just short-term fixes. We need content governance. But where does the process start? In this session, learn how to plan for content governance—managing content roles, responsibilities, processes, documentation, tools and training. Create a sustainable content plan stakeholders can buy into and a website that can survive day two of your website redesign launch.
Get Better Content with Analytics and User TestingMichael Powers
So you're going to Confab Higher Ed. You're already pretty excited about content strategy. But your boss and colleagues? Not so much. To outsiders, content strategy is just another buzzword. And as more schools move to become "data-driven" organizations, talking about content can sound hopelessly qualitative.
So don't say "content strategy": do it. This session will look at content strategy practices you can introduce to show even your most quantitatively-oriented colleagues the value of content strategy: content analytics, social media analytics, and user testing techniques. Rack up successes first—then start talking content strategy.
• Introduce content strategy practices into your organization when your organization doesn't care about content strategy.
• Use analytics to identify what needs improvement.
• Learn how user-testing techniques can improve your content.
Presentation for the UX Unconference held at the University of Arizona Libraries, December 6th, 2013. Video recording of the presentation available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O_4jledWjM
Presentation by Gary Atwood (Springfield College) and Kelcy Shepherd (UMass) on web site management. Presented at the 2009 Massachusetts Library Association Conference. Kelcy Shepherd created this presentation with input from Gary.
Don't Design Websites. Design Web SYSTEMS! (Dallas Drupal Days 2011)Four Kitchens
This presentation was given at Dallas Drupal Days by Aaron Stanush and Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens (July 8, 2011)
For more Four Kitchens presentations, please visit http://fourkitchens.com/presentations
Don't Design Websites. Design Web SYSTEMS! (BADCamp 2011)Four Kitchens
This presentation was given at BADCamp by Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens (October 23, 2011)
For more Four Kitchens presentations, please visit http://fourkitchens.com/presentations
Design Thinking for the Masses: Creating a Culture of Empathy Across a Librar...Rebecca Blakiston
Design thinking puts users at the forefront. It encourages us to practice empathy, observe our surroundings, question assumptions, and identify big problems. It then asks us to prototype and iterate on solutions. Inspired by the power of these concepts, University of Arizona Libraries initiated a library-wide design thinking project. This inclusive, collaborative effort guided strategic initiatives and put user experience in the minds of library employees at all levels.
Presentation at Designing for Digital 2018 in Austin, Texas.
Presentation by Rebecca Blakiston, America Darling Curl, and Lara Miller at the University of Arizona IT Summit 2019. October 29 in Tucson, AZ.
Website content is often hidden behind cumbersome menus. How can we better label, organize, and design navigation so users can find what they need? Learn two information architecture techniques for a better user experience: card sorts for creating categories, and tree testing for identifying navigation paths.
Webinar workshop for LibraryLinkNJ. Covers the various types of web copy libraries create, as well as thinking about audience and how people read on the web. Discussion of voice and tone, including the importance of being conversational, honest and kind. Essential tips for high impact writing such as structure, writing for scannability, good use of links and avoiding jargon.
Framing content as a touchpoint, this talk discusses the ways and states in which users arrive at library content. It covers the various types of web copy libraries create and strategies to approach each with empathy, plus thinking about voice and tone.
Fast, Cheap, and Actionable: Creating an Affordable User Research Program (Th...Michael Powers
Done a usability study? Ready for the next step? Today we have an abundance of fast, affordable user research methods, many of which can be done remotely with real users. Learn about available user research options and how one university runs successful research projects that lead to actionable insights.
Presentation for the UX Unconference held at the University of Arizona Libraries, December 6th, 2013. Video recording of the presentation available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzG1G9gpTVU.
Using your Voice to Amplify Your Career
Lunch and Learn Series: QCRI Summer Intern Programme
Presented at Qatar Computing Research Institute
May 14, 2015
Topics include: how to use your data and research to build your audience and network, managing your career development, building your professional network, how to public speak and locating mentors
We get it. Our website is a process, not a project. Without a content plan redesign projects are just short-term fixes. We need content governance. But where does the process start? In this session, learn how to plan for content governance—managing content roles, responsibilities, processes, documentation, tools and training. Create a sustainable content plan stakeholders can buy into and a website that can survive day two of your website redesign launch.
Get Better Content with Analytics and User TestingMichael Powers
So you're going to Confab Higher Ed. You're already pretty excited about content strategy. But your boss and colleagues? Not so much. To outsiders, content strategy is just another buzzword. And as more schools move to become "data-driven" organizations, talking about content can sound hopelessly qualitative.
So don't say "content strategy": do it. This session will look at content strategy practices you can introduce to show even your most quantitatively-oriented colleagues the value of content strategy: content analytics, social media analytics, and user testing techniques. Rack up successes first—then start talking content strategy.
• Introduce content strategy practices into your organization when your organization doesn't care about content strategy.
• Use analytics to identify what needs improvement.
• Learn how user-testing techniques can improve your content.
Presentation for the UX Unconference held at the University of Arizona Libraries, December 6th, 2013. Video recording of the presentation available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O_4jledWjM
Presentation by Gary Atwood (Springfield College) and Kelcy Shepherd (UMass) on web site management. Presented at the 2009 Massachusetts Library Association Conference. Kelcy Shepherd created this presentation with input from Gary.
Don't Design Websites. Design Web SYSTEMS! (Dallas Drupal Days 2011)Four Kitchens
This presentation was given at Dallas Drupal Days by Aaron Stanush and Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens (July 8, 2011)
For more Four Kitchens presentations, please visit http://fourkitchens.com/presentations
Don't Design Websites. Design Web SYSTEMS! (BADCamp 2011)Four Kitchens
This presentation was given at BADCamp by Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens (October 23, 2011)
For more Four Kitchens presentations, please visit http://fourkitchens.com/presentations
Don't Design Websites. Design Web SYSTEMS! (DrupalCon London 2011)Four Kitchens
This presentation was given at DrupalCon London by Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens and Adam Snetman of Thinkso Creative (August 24, 2011)
For more Four Kitchens presentations, please visit http://fourkitchens.com/presentations
“If they would just listen to us...”: Turning Internal Client Relationships i...Michael Powers
You’re smart. (You do work in higher ed, after all.) You know your stuff. You have ideas. New ideas. Good ideas. And yet—your clients (internal or external) don’t want your ideas. Or your style guide. They know what they want: the same thing they’ve been doing for the last ten years. Why won’t they just listen to you?
The answer is finding ways to turn to client relationships into real collaborations. When we move from a conformance mindset to a collaboration mindset, we can find ourselves in the position to do our best work—work our clients will love.
What you’ll learn:
• How to move from a conformance to a collaboration mindset.
• Using workshop techniques (like job stories, pair writing, mad libs, and more) in meeting settings.
• How to uncover the real problems your clients are facing, and solve them—together.
Don't Design Websites. Design Web SYSTEMS! (UT Austin Drupal Users Group)Four Kitchens
This presentation was given at the UT Austin Drupal Users Group by Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens (June 19, 2012)
For more Four Kitchens presentations, please visit http://fourkitchens.com/presentations
Forty Design Director, Amy Lamp, was lucky enough to make it to DC's An Event Apart—a conference for people who care about code as well as content, and usability as well as design—and has brought back a a bevy of web knowledge goodness to share with everyone at PHX Content Strategy.
Culture eats strategy for lunch? Hah—not this time! Ancestry.com has undergone a significant and rapid transformation to continuous delivery and business agility in less than three years—and they are not done yet. Today, Ancestry has a culture significantly different from what it used to, made possible by the adoption of new practices, tools, organizational changes, management involvement, and dramatic shifts in mindset. Adopting Agile development was the catalyst, but much more had to be mixed in to create their own flavor of DevOps and continuous delivery. This talk will focus on the specific challenges, phases, and actions taken during Ancestry’s cultural metamorphosis. Come listen to how Ancestry has beaten the culture monster so you can too!
This presentation was delivered to the Chicago Product Management Association in June 2011. It draws on my practical experience as a software designer, but significantly upon "Designing with the Mind in Mind" by Jeff Johnson and "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Normal. If you're interested in the topic, both are fascinating reads.
This presentation was part of a day-long symposium for educators and web designers to come together for talks about design principles, industry skills and standards as it applies to preparing students for careers in design.
Presentation for the NISO Humanities Roundtable, September 23, 2020.
We design systems so that students and scholars can discover and access content, yet how do we know we are meeting their needs and expectations? How do we know if our language and taxonomies are enhancing or hindering discovery? In this presentation, you will learn techniques for putting yourself in the mind of your users. You’ll learn what we should do more and what we should do less to better optimize the user experience.
User experience (UX) is a multidisciplinary venture that encompasses research, design, content, architecture, engineering, and systems. At the University of Arizona, an informal community of practice emerged in 2017 called “UX@UA” to support cross-departmental learning and sharing of resources. This community now includes over 400 students, faculty, and staff who are studying, teaching, and doing UX. Members of the UX@UA leadership team are from the Libraries, Department of English, Eller College of Management, and Digital Learning. In addition to monthly meetup events for sharing knowledge and networking, the group is supporting campus initiatives such as lightweight user testing through a “Tiny Cafe,” a shared participant pool, a drop-in UX consulting hour, a toolkit of reusable templates, and a UX/UI testing zone in the library. In this talk, you will learn how we are building capacity, breaking down silos, and fostering user-centered thinking and practices campus-wide.
Presentation for CNI Spring meeting, 2020.
Advancing Student Success: A Design Thinking WorkshopRebecca Blakiston
Workshop delivered in January, 2020, for the staff of the Copley Library at the University of San Diego.
Student success is critical to the mission of the university, but the needs and expectations of our students are evolving rapidly. As a library, how might we empower all students to be successful in 2020 and beyond? Using a design thinking framework, we will spend the afternoon tackling this question together by:
- building understanding through empathy exercises and personas
- generating ideas through ideation and affinity mapping
- visualizing solutions through prototyping
Keynote presentation at the Web Content for Everyone Symposium: Usability, Accessibility, and Content Creation. Held at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, May 15, 2019.
Our university websites are the primary way we deliver information to students, faculty, and staff. So it’s critical that people of all backgrounds and abilities are able to find, access, and understand our web content. In this presentation, you’ll learn the key principles to creating content that is useful, usable, and accessible to all. We will discuss techniques including plain language, heading structure, content prioritization, meaningful links, alternative text, and more.
Attendees will:
* Recognize why plain language is important to inclusive design
* Be able to create content accessible to screen readers
* Understand how to write content grounded in principles of universal design
A Human-Centered Strategy for Advancing Library ValueRebecca Blakiston
Keynote presentation for the Michigan Academic Library Association Annual Conference. #mialaac19
Academic libraries are essential contributors to the higher education mission, supporting student success, faculty research productivity, and community engagement. And as the role of the academic library evolves, we are given countless opportunities to provide value through ever-transforming spaces, technology, collections, programs, and services that meet the needs and expectations of our students and faculty. Even with resource constraints, our options are unlimited, and our potential is huge. In this presentation, we’ll discuss ways the modern academic library is positioned to provide unique and significant value to our campus communities. Applying a user experience framework, let’s challenge ourselves to ask: how might we assess, iterate on, and build upon our value by focusing in on what really matters the most?
Presentation by Rebecca Blakiston and Ann Shivers-McNair at edUi in Charlottesville, VA, October 2018.
In higher education, forms are everywhere. Students use them to register for classes, staff use them to get technical help, and faculty use them to request classroom spaces and technology. But too often, we don’t give these forms the care and nurturing they deserve. In this session, attendees will learn how to empathize with users in order to design and write forms that are better for the people who have to use them. Attendees will learn how to ensure their forms are inclusive, approachable, and human-centered. We will cover a range of considerations from format, plain language, and structure to details like confirmation messages, button placement, and field labels. By the end of this session, attendees will be able to create forms that have users saying, “that’s nice!” and not, “this sucks!”
Presentation by Rebecca Blakiston and Gardie Lueders at the AzLA 2018 Annual Conference in Mesa, AZ.
Libraries provide a lot of valuable services to graduate students, but how can we make these services more useful and impactful? Learn how the University of Arizona Libraries is studying the graduate student experience to better serve this user group. We will discuss how we gathered data through experience mapping, user interviews, and environmental scanning. We'll also discuss how the user experience (UX) team collaborated with research and learning librarians and the marketing manager to uncover insights and generate solutions.
Training session delivered at the Tohono O'odham Department of Education by Rebecca Blakiston, Shoshana Mayden, and Donovan Pete. As the staff recently received access to a website and would be creating web pages for the first time, we focused on key principles of web usability, planning web content, and writing web content.
Presentation for edUi in Charlottesville, VA, 10/24/16.
Auditing content, analyzing processes, creating governance structures, developing workflows, writing standards and style guides, organizing trainings… naysayers will argue that content strategy can be expensive, time-consuming, and a royal waste of time. We disagree.
In this talk, we’ll share some quick and dirty content strategy methods you can use to get your efforts moving without going broke or losing your mind. We’ll also share how we advocated for content strategy at our institution, convincing the naysayers that it’s worth the investment and that the long-term impacts will benefit us all.
What you’ll learn:
- Cheap, quick methods to improve your web content
- Practical strategies for getting buy-in from naysayers
- Tried and true ways to set a foundation for long-term content strategy initiatives
August 30, 2016. As part of our day-long retreat, the Technology Strategy & Services department participated in discussions about our vision for the future. As lead for our web design & user experience team, I led this presentation about how we can build on work we're currently doing, and big dreams for the future going forward.
Intentional Leadership at All Levels: Takeaways from the ALA Leadership Insti...Rebecca Blakiston
Presentation for library staff at the University of Arizona on September 10th, 2014. Based upon the ALA Leadership Institute held in Itasca, Illinois in August.
Presentation by Sonali Mishra, University of Michigan Libraries, for the UX Unconference held at the University of Arizona Libraries, December 6th, 2013.
UX Unconference - Information Architecture (Susan Teague Rector)Rebecca Blakiston
Presentation by Susan Teague Rector, University of Colorado Denver, for the UX Unconference held at the University of Arizona Libraries, December 6th, 2013.
UX Unconference - Designing a Usable Website (Carolyn Ellis)Rebecca Blakiston
Presentation by Carolyn Ellis, University of Texas San Antonio, for the UX Unconference held at the University of Arizona Libraries, December 6th, 2013.
Getting ‘Em on Board: Guiding Staff Through Times of ChangeRebecca Blakiston
Presentation for edUi 2013 in Richmond, VA. Presented by Rebecca Blakiston, University of Arizona, and Kim Vassiliadis, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
A Strategic Approach: GenAI in EducationPeter Windle
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Generative AI, Image Generators and Large Language Models have had a dramatic impact on teaching, learning and assessment over the past 18 months. The most immediate threat AI posed was to Academic Integrity with Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) focusing their efforts on combating the use of GenAI in assessment. Guidelines were developed for staff and students, policies put in place too. Innovative educators have forged paths in the use of Generative AI for teaching, learning and assessments leading to pockets of transformation springing up across HEIs, often with little or no top-down guidance, support or direction.
This Gasta posits a strategic approach to integrating AI into HEIs to prepare staff, students and the curriculum for an evolving world and workplace. We will highlight the advantages of working with these technologies beyond the realm of teaching, learning and assessment by considering prompt engineering skills, industry impact, curriculum changes, and the need for staff upskilling. In contrast, not engaging strategically with Generative AI poses risks, including falling behind peers, missed opportunities and failing to ensure our graduates remain employable. The rapid evolution of AI technologies necessitates a proactive and strategic approach if we are to remain relevant.
How to Add Chatter in the odoo 17 ERP ModuleCeline George
In Odoo, the chatter is like a chat tool that helps you work together on records. You can leave notes and track things, making it easier to talk with your team and partners. Inside chatter, all communication history, activity, and changes will be displayed.
This slide is special for master students (MIBS & MIFB) in UUM. Also useful for readers who are interested in the topic of contemporary Islamic banking.
Executive Directors Chat Leveraging AI for Diversity, Equity, and InclusionTechSoup
Let’s explore the intersection of technology and equity in the final session of our DEI series. Discover how AI tools, like ChatGPT, can be used to support and enhance your nonprofit's DEI initiatives. Participants will gain insights into practical AI applications and get tips for leveraging technology to advance their DEI goals.
Exploiting Artificial Intelligence for Empowering Researchers and Faculty, In...Dr. Vinod Kumar Kanvaria
Exploiting Artificial Intelligence for Empowering Researchers and Faculty,
International FDP on Fundamentals of Research in Social Sciences
at Integral University, Lucknow, 06.06.2024
By Dr. Vinod Kumar Kanvaria
it describes the bony anatomy including the femoral head , acetabulum, labrum . also discusses the capsule , ligaments . muscle that act on the hip joint and the range of motion are outlined. factors affecting hip joint stability and weight transmission through the joint are summarized.
MATATAG CURRICULUM: ASSESSING THE READINESS OF ELEM. PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS I...NelTorrente
In this research, it concludes that while the readiness of teachers in Caloocan City to implement the MATATAG Curriculum is generally positive, targeted efforts in professional development, resource distribution, support networks, and comprehensive preparation can address the existing gaps and ensure successful curriculum implementation.
This presentation includes basic of PCOS their pathology and treatment and also Ayurveda correlation of PCOS and Ayurvedic line of treatment mentioned in classics.
Delivering Micro-Credentials in Technical and Vocational Education and TrainingAG2 Design
Explore how micro-credentials are transforming Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) with this comprehensive slide deck. Discover what micro-credentials are, their importance in TVET, the advantages they offer, and the insights from industry experts. Additionally, learn about the top software applications available for creating and managing micro-credentials. This presentation also includes valuable resources and a discussion on the future of these specialised certifications.
For more detailed information on delivering micro-credentials in TVET, visit this https://tvettrainer.com/delivering-micro-credentials-in-tvet/
2024.06.01 Introducing a competency framework for languag learning materials ...Sandy Millin
http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/iateflwebinar2024
Published classroom materials form the basis of syllabuses, drive teacher professional development, and have a potentially huge influence on learners, teachers and education systems. All teachers also create their own materials, whether a few sentences on a blackboard, a highly-structured fully-realised online course, or anything in between. Despite this, the knowledge and skills needed to create effective language learning materials are rarely part of teacher training, and are mostly learnt by trial and error.
Knowledge and skills frameworks, generally called competency frameworks, for ELT teachers, trainers and managers have existed for a few years now. However, until I created one for my MA dissertation, there wasn’t one drawing together what we need to know and do to be able to effectively produce language learning materials.
This webinar will introduce you to my framework, highlighting the key competencies I identified from my research. It will also show how anybody involved in language teaching (any language, not just English!), teacher training, managing schools or developing language learning materials can benefit from using the framework.
June 3, 2024 Anti-Semitism Letter Sent to MIT President Kornbluth and MIT Cor...Levi Shapiro
Letter from the Congress of the United States regarding Anti-Semitism sent June 3rd to MIT President Sally Kornbluth, MIT Corp Chair, Mark Gorenberg
Dear Dr. Kornbluth and Mr. Gorenberg,
The US House of Representatives is deeply concerned by ongoing and pervasive acts of antisemitic
harassment and intimidation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Failing to act decisively to ensure a safe learning environment for all students would be a grave dereliction of your responsibilities as President of MIT and Chair of the MIT Corporation.
This Congress will not stand idly by and allow an environment hostile to Jewish students to persist. The House believes that your institution is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and the inability or
unwillingness to rectify this violation through action requires accountability.
Postsecondary education is a unique opportunity for students to learn and have their ideas and beliefs challenged. However, universities receiving hundreds of millions of federal funds annually have denied
students that opportunity and have been hijacked to become venues for the promotion of terrorism, antisemitic harassment and intimidation, unlawful encampments, and in some cases, assaults and riots.
The House of Representatives will not countenance the use of federal funds to indoctrinate students into hateful, antisemitic, anti-American supporters of terrorism. Investigations into campus antisemitism by the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Committee on Ways and Means have been expanded into a Congress-wide probe across all relevant jurisdictions to address this national crisis. The undersigned Committees will conduct oversight into the use of federal funds at MIT and its learning environment under authorities granted to each Committee.
• The Committee on Education and the Workforce has been investigating your institution since December 7, 2023. The Committee has broad jurisdiction over postsecondary education, including its compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, campus safety concerns over disruptions to the learning environment, and the awarding of federal student aid under the Higher Education Act.
• The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating the sources of funding and other support flowing to groups espousing pro-Hamas propaganda and engaged in antisemitic harassment and intimidation of students. The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is the principal oversight committee of the US House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time” under House Rule X.
• The Committee on Ways and Means has been investigating several universities since November 15, 2023, when the Committee held a hearing entitled From Ivory Towers to Dark Corners: Investigating the Nexus Between Antisemitism, Tax-Exempt Universities, and Terror Financing. The Committee followed the hearing with letters to those institutions on January 10, 202
June 3, 2024 Anti-Semitism Letter Sent to MIT President Kornbluth and MIT Cor...
Too Many Cooks in the Web Kitchen? A successful case of herding cats to improve the user experience
1. Too Many Cooks in the
Web Kitchen?
A successful case of herding
cats to improve the user
experience
Rebecca Blakiston, University of Arizona Libraries, 2012
3. What am I supposed to
be doing again?
Responsibilities aren’t clear.
4. My best My primary Truffle oil
customers are audience is makes
college wealthy couples everything
students better
Truffle oil is so
overrated…
Everyone has an opinion.
20. Create detailed scenarios.
Walter needs to find American newspapers
from the 1700s through today…
he doesn’t know what is available or where to start.
23. Establish a voice and tone.
Knowledgeable, not preachy.
Helpful, not frustrating.
Welcoming, not full of jargon.
Professional, not pompous.
Conversational, not preachy.
Approachable, not intimidating.
Direct, not complicated.
25. Less like… More like…
The customer should login to their Sign in now to request an article.
Illiad account to request a
document delivery.
Library staff will respond to user We want you to feel safe in the
complaints by enforcing the code of library. Please notify desk staff if
conduct. you have any concerns.
The University of Arizona Fine Arts The Fine Arts Library includes all of
Library (formerly the UA Music our music collection as well as a
Library) houses the UA Libraries' small selection of architecture
music holdings and, along with the materials.
Main Library, a small portion of the
Libraries' architecture holdings,
most of which are kept in the
Science Engineering Library.
28. Assign new roles and responsibilities.
back-up
garnish
service
appetizers
orders
meat
prep
desserts fish sides
29. Organize trainings so that everyone has the
knowledge and skills to get the job done.
30. Establish a workflow for
creating a page.
Publisher
Reviewer edits launches the
the page page
Content
Manager
creates the
Provider page
talks to
Content
Manager
Requestor
talks to
provider
31. Establish a workflow for
deleting a page.
Publisher
deletes the
Content page
Manager sends
deletion request
Content to Publisher
Manager
removes or
Content updates all
Manager internal links
communicates
with
Content stakeholders
Manager
determines
page should
be deleted
Welcome, intro, who I am, where I work, what I do.Title of the presentation and what I’m going to talk about. Going to use the analogy of too many cooks in the kitchen to explain what our common problems are related to too many stakeholders - and how I was able to address our problems specifically at the UA Libraries.
The problems we are all facing is that our websites are complex. Lots of ingredients.Our institutions have hundreds if not thousands of web pages. Lots of independent sites and complex applications that may have to interact with one another. We also have countless stakeholders and responsible parties. Just imagining how to coordinate all of this stuff and where to even start can be overwhelming. (This is a recipe for Chicken Mole Poblano adapted from Rick Bayless).
In a lot of cases, the authority and responsibility related to web content isn’t clear. Standards sometimes exist and sometimes they don’t. Accountability for standards is usually unclear or nonexistent.
There are a lot of opinionated people when it comes to the website. Stakeholders often include external relations, the marketing department, and all of those who are on the front lines. Everyone wants their message to be first. A lot of time we have numerous “primary audiences.” Universities have prospective students, new students, current students, alumni, and prospective and current faculty and staff. Not to mention donors and potential donors.Also there are outreach initiatives so the broader local, national and international communities are also possible primary audiences.When it comes to the design of the site, the IA, labeling and navigation, and the content within the website, everyone has their own opinion.Who has authority to make decisions regarding our primary messages? What content should be on the homepage?Throughout this presentation, I will use the analogy of too many cooks in the kitchen. It turns out we have many similar issues…
I’m going to look at the University of Arizona Libraries as a case study. Over the past year, we were able to successfully wrangle stakeholders, establish communication mechanisms, and establish authority and decision-making related to our site. It’s not perfect, but it’s a case that I think is worth learning from.The University of Arizona Libraries have had a website since October, 1994. Since then we have added more websites to our website family, including a website for our Special Collections, the Center for Creative Photography, Giving to the Libraries, Data Management, and various Digital Collections and Online Exhibitions. We have 150 staff members, 5 buildings, and over 5 million books. Our main website gets 2.5 million visits a year, which includes over 1 million unique visitors.On our main site, there have been numerous website redesign projects in the past 15 years. Most recently, in 2009, the library outsourced the redesign. Usability was conducted by an outside agency and some significant changes were made to the homepage. However, there has been little critical look at the overall structure of the site. And barely any look at the actual content behind the navigation and the structure let alone the processes by which content is initially created then updated then deleted.In 2010, there were about 60 library staff and students workers who had Drupal accounts and could edit the main website. Who could get a Drupal account? Any employee who asked for it. They attended a one-hour training on the Drupal editor; in some cases, they just got a 5-page Drupal manual and were sent on their way.Not only could they now go in and make edits to any Drupal page on the web server, published or not, they could create new pages from scratch and place them anywhere on the site. Instruction librarians, collection development librarians, circulation staff, IT staff, marketing & public relations staff, administrators, development office, Interlibrary Loan staff, everyone. For years, there was no oversight and no standards related to content. So what did this mean?
Our website was a mess.Outdated content.Irrelevant content.Inconsistent messages.Content in weird places.People were making lots of content and no one was cleaning anything up.Someone had to be put in charge. We had an IT department that sort of oversaw the website (they managed our web servers and you had to ask them if you wanted to delete a page), they also trained people in Drupal (a one-hour training on the technical functions of creating a link, etc.), but there was no real leadership or authority and no individual to clean up this mess.Fortunately, library administrators understood these issues and decided to do something about it. Library administration put me in charge - I was assigned as the Website Product Manager. I was given authority to oversee the current and future state of our websites. I had absolutely no technical background, but I had worked in public services for about 5 years, was student-focused, and I was pretty good at bringing people together, organizing things, and communicating.It was somewhat experimental, since Product Management was a new concept for all of us.I was charged with creating a road map for the next 3-5 years. But who was I to make these decisions by myself? With so many stakeholders, it was super important that I bring them into the discussion. So before diving in, I formed a communication plan.
Decided to form a Website Steering Group that would act as an advisory group to me. This was a small, agile group of experts – it would include a web developer from our Digital Library Team as well as a representative from public services to speak to the needs of our audience. (It also later included my website student assistant).We would meet every week and they would help me through the process of developing and implementing the road map.There were a lot morestakeholders that wanted input. First, met with every team in the library, there are 9 teams including Access Services, Research Services, Instruction Services, Digital Library Team, Administration. Just went to their regular meetings and asked open-ended questions: what problems have you seen our users experience with the current website? Soon after, created a Team Liaisons model.
In the library, staff are organized into teams – 10 teams total, and so every team that has a stake in the website (nearly every team) appointed a Team Liaison and the Website Steering Group would meet monthly with Team Liaisons to solicit input.Have been meeting every month since, just for an hour. When I need broader input from the library, I ask the Team Liaisons to facilitate this input; makes it much easier than attending team meetings to reach all those people! Sometimes when there is nothing on the agenda the meeting will be cancelled, but there is always the option for a Team Liaison to put something on the agenda if they have something they want to talk about.Every month I also send out an e-mail to all library staff, 180 recipients including our staff, faculty, and some graduate assistants and student workers. “Updates from the Website Steering Group.” Have received very positive feedback about these e-mails. It allows everyone who wants to stay in the loop.
It’s important to build trust. If the stakeholder don’t trust that you know what you’re doing, it’s going to be hard to get buy-in and implement new policies and procedures.Suggestions for building trust:Listen and respond to input. We tracked every suggestion we heard during initial stakeholder meetings. We made changes based on suggestions we heard, and followed up with those suggestions that we didn’t implement, explaining why.Ask for input from the appropriate people before making big decisions.Be completely transparent in your process and how decisions are made.Document.Overdocument. We use redmine as a project management tool to track everything that we do, so when issues come up we can look at the history and what we have addressed. Redmine has been very valuable in keeping us focused and managing all of our work.
To give context to the road map and justification for my future decision-making, I outlined a vision, goals, strategies, and metrics. When working with so many people, you need to make sure you are all on the same page and are working towards the same goal. What do you really want to see in the next 1, 2, or 3 years?This is the vision:The website is reliable, easy to use, and accurate. It exemplifies the principles of user-centered design, and users consistently and readily find what they need. It advances our goals of discovery, information access, and quality customer service.We developed this and shared broadly. We can now reference it when we make decisions. All of our decisions should reflect this vision.
Developed a total of 9 goals with associated strategies for reaching those goals and metrics for measuring success. In a restaurant, you want the customers to buy food, to buy drinks, to be happy, to have a good experience, to tip well.In our case of the website, one of our goals is: Users can easily find information about library resources and services.Each goal is written from the user perspective – what is the end goal for the user (not the organization). This helps keep things in perspective. We are service oriented and therefore everything that we do as educational institutions is for the user, not for ourselves.
There are 3 strategies associated with the goal. These are ways that we can achieve the goal.For the goal I just mentioned - Users can easily find information about library resources and services.Strategies: The user does not need to know the library’s name of a service to find it on our site and use it. Content is organized and labeled in a logical way to the user (not by library organizational structure or jargon).Content is placed where the user expects to find it, not necessarily where staff think it should go.By writing this out and getting buy-in from stakeholders, it becomes much easier to justify certain decisions. For example, we recently removed the term “Express Document Center” from our global menu because this is a library-specific term that most of our website users don’t understand. We proposed changing it to “Print, Copy, Scan.” (These are the services provided by the Express Document Center). They are more action or task-based, and they reflect what the user is wanting to do, not what the library organization calls something.
Develop metrics to measure success. Some accountability to see if your strategies are actually moving you closer to meeting your goals.So for the goal I mentioned, the metrics are things that can be measured through usability testing.100% of users can successfully complete these tasks:Find library hoursComplete an Express Documents requestComplete an Interlibrary Loan request When users click on a link, they know what to expect (i.e. a table, questions, a search box). 100% of the time, users are not surprised at what appears.There is a reduced superiority gap in the LibQual survey for the category: “A library website enabling me to locate information on my own.”The first two can be tracked with usability testing. The last one relates to a campus survey that we conduct every year.
Once these basic principles were established and I had buy-in, I was able to move forward in developing a content strategy that made sense for our organization. I focused on the main website, which has the most complex content and the largest number of content providers. I got the book, “Content Strategy for the Web.” It was just what I needed. It became my bible and inspired me to develop a content strategy that would untangle the mess.
The first step was to understand the problem, and an audit of your website content will do just this. By understanding what we have, we can better plan how to manage what already exists as well as plan for the future.Over two months, with the help of some student workers, we went through the website and documented every single page that we found with a unique page ID number, which was over a thousand. We made notes on problems I ran across.
This is an example from the Excel spreadsheet which ended up being 20 different sheets within the same excel document. One sheet for each Tier 1 in the URL structure (so everything under the “Help” menu was on one sheet).We began cleaning up, promptly deleting nearly 200 pages we found that were out of date, irrelevant, duplicate, or “test” pages. In the subsequent year, dozens of other pages were deleted, merged, or revamped because of what was found in the inventory.It was very important to share what we found with the organization more broadly…
It brought to the surface all of our content problems and made the larger organization and all of the stakeholders aware of the need for a content strategy. Of course, the goal wasn’t to yell at people and make them feel bad, because it wasn’t really their fault – it was the lack of standards and clear processes that led to the mess.But by sharing what we found we were able to get buy-in from the organization that this was indeed a serious problem and something had to be done.Some of the problems we found were: outdated content, poor URL structure and information architecture, inconsistent formatting, duplicate pages, and along with lots of typos we found poor web writing generally (i.e. long paragraphs of text; text that was clearly just copied & pasted from old print documents).
After the audit, we conducted an analysis of the environment. This is important to set a strategic foundation for future decisions.
Part of this analysis is understanding your audience and why people come to your website (or to your restaurant) in the first place.You can do this by developing personas that realistically represent your primary users. Meet Walter. He is our primaryfaculty member persona for the UA Libraries.
For each persona, we answered the following questions:Why the UA?How’s academic life?andWhat’s your Research Process?We also listed Fast Facts (age, field, hobbies), giving him a personality. And we listed how he uses the library and what his challenges are related to the library (used to have libraries teach & have course reserves but those services are no longer offered; often has a hard time convincing his students the importance of using the library).Most importantly, we list detailed task scenarios. In this case, his scenarios relate to the library supporting his teaching (research assignments he gives his students) and his own research.Make sure that your vision, goals, and strategies align with your audience and their scenarios. For us, discovery, information access, and quality customer service were forefront, so this vision did not change.
Once your audience is defined, you are ready to review Current Processes: Interview stakeholders, diagram current workflows, and review all existing documentation related to the creation of content and the ongoing maintenance of your website. We pulled together documentation from previous website redesign projects, training documentation, campus rules and standards, and our internal policies and procedures, which were (not surprisingly) quite minimal.Bring together your group of stakeholders and discuss what is working and what isn’t.
As part of this analysis document, we also established a philosophy surrounding our content. You have limited resources, and you can’t be everything to everyone.Our philosophy is this:We want high quality, succinct content that is relevant to users and speaks in their language. In most cases, less content is better than more, because it is easier to manage, is more user-friendly, and costs less to create. (adapted from Content Strategy for the Web)
We then established a voice and tone. This gives personality to your content, and should reflect the brand of your institution.In our standards we say, “Messages on our website must support our brand. We are customer-focused organization, so let’s use their language. Voice and tone needs to reflect our customer-centered personality.” and then we explain by saying we are X not Y.
Develop standards. These could be web standards for Section 508 compliance, standards for your campus banner/brand, standards for header & footer, standard wireframes or formatting within certain types of pages. Your audit likely pointed out where you have the biggest problems – where things are inconsistent - and this is where you should focus.In my case, my focus was on the really poor content that we found on our site. So I wanted to create standards for the creators & editors of our web content – we needed editorial standards that would support our core purpose. How many of you have editorial standards?We developed what is now an 8 page document of editorial standards. Made sure they were in line with our Marketing Department’s style guide.
We also include examples of good and bad website content. Examples such as these have proved very helpful in training.Similar to the voice & tone, it’s useful to say what something should be vs. what something should not be.
Also specifics including what specific language and standard terms; what URLs should look like; what page titles should look like.Formatting – what headers should be used for what; when & how to use things like CAPS, bold, underlines, bullets, numbering. What should links look like – is it ok to spell out the URL of a link? Should they open in a new window or the same window? We actually developed a whole new document to handle links specifically. When your content management system can enforce your standards, take advantage of it. Especially when you have a lot of content creators, it will make everyone’s life easier to enforce things technically where possible (title caps, font color, no underlining, etc.).Expand these standards to related content. For us, we have research guides that are developed separately from our regular Drupal pages even though to the user they appear as if they live on the same website. So these standards were shared & adopted by the managers of that separate process. We also did the same for our tutorials developed in authoring tools (Captivate, Articulate, etc.). These also follow a different creation process.Get down to as much detail as you want. These will keep expanding as new questions come up.So at this point we sort of have a vision of what we want the website to be. We’ve cleaned up a bit, we have a defined audience, we have a voice and tone, we have standards, and we know about current processes.
Now we have a great foundation to build our content strategy. This is the meat and potatoes. By establishing an effective and efficient content strategy, we ensure that our website content is and continues to be useful, usable, and findable.I’m going to describe what methods we came up with to manage our complex content in a way that is efficient, effective, and sustainable.
Assign New Roles & Responsibilities: Establish who will be responsible for what. Got to break up the work to ensure that people’s skills are being utilized, they are trained on what they need to be trained, work is not overlapping/duplicative, that resources are being used efficiently.In our case, we decided that we needed to have trained Content Managers – people who would be trained and would be responsible for maintaining and updating a specific inventory web pages, as well as being responsible for the creation of new pages and the deletion of pages. Another advantage to having a content inventory is that you can assign someone to every single page that exists. No more “sections of the website” – each individual page has a contact person.We established 14 content managers. Didn’t want to call them “creators” or “owners.” By calling them managers, it implies that they are responsible not just for maintenance, but for overall management of their pages. These content managers were the only ones given permission in Drupal to edit a live web page. So we went from 60 website editors down to 14.Then we have content providers. These are people that have the raw content knowledge, but don’t know Drupal, haven’t been trained on our standards or how to write for the web. They were given access to edit a draft of a web page, but cannot edit a live page. So they have to work with the content manager to make any updates.
We organize trainings so that everyone understands their role and has the knowledge and skills to get the job done. For content managers, we hosted trainings in Drupal, editorial standards, writing for the web, and Google Analytics. We also hosted training on the new workflow. Every Team Liaison which I mentioned earlier (10 of them) is also a content manager, but some teams have multiple content managers which is why there are 14.
Establish Workflows: Build effective and efficient processes for the creation, updating, and deletion of web pages. Utilize your content management system to support these workflows. For example, to create a web page: Anyone can be a requestor – could be someone who works in the library or could be a student or faculty member out on campus. The requestor talks to Provider of the content, who then must talk to the Content Manager. The content manager gets in touch with the Website Steering Group and we discuss whether or not a web page is necessary and if so – what it should be called and where it should live.Assuming the pate is approved, the content manager creates the page and then a reviewer (me) reviews it before publishing.This allows us to ensure that every new page is not only up to standard, but is of high quality – using effective web writing, overall structure, and that it is placed somewhere logical to the user. We might not be able to tackle every page on our site right now, but we can at minimum ensure anything new is reviewed for quality before going live.
Similarly, we established a workflow for deleting a page. This process ensures that there is communication with stakeholders who might use the page and also ensures that we don’t have dead links on our site. In the past, someone could just request a page be deleted and we would have dead links on our site because of it; or worse, a page would just never get deleted when it really should be, because no one was held responsible for the lifecycle of web content. (Remember the 200 pages I mentioned we deleted as part of our audit?)
Ensure Your Strategy is Sustainable: Establish a system of accountability. Talk to the supervisors of the people with the new roles to make sure they are on board.Depending on your level of authority, see if you can have responsibilities added to job descriptions or performance reviews.I asked that each content manager include website content management in their annual goals. Many had it added to their job description as well. This ensures some level of accountability.I developed a template for the content managers; it includes that they will attend trainings that are offered, participate as a team liaison, review, update & delete existing pages, and create new pages as needed.Develop, track, and report on metrics. Have a plan in place for when someone new needs to be trained. Establish a communication plan. Ongoing feedback is essential. Allow your content strategy to be fluid. Adjust processes as needed, stay aware of new developments, and take advantage of technology that will support your content strategy.
Don’t get stressed out. Depending on your organization, it might be a struggle to get buy-in and to change policies. There might be red tape and it might be a long process to get things in place.Don’t give up and throw people out of the kitchen.Keep the user in mind and realize that 99% of your colleagues do want what is best for your students, faculty, and communities.
Be open to change. Nothing is ever set in stone. Responsibilities can and should change. Just try to stay on top of it.
And of course, always keep the user in mind. All standards, workflows, and new roles & responsibilities should be towards your user-centered goals for your website. You’re doing it for them.Questions?