Digital at the University of York

A new home for our blog posts

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 12:11:00 +0000

We're now posting on the University of York Marketing blog instead of here. We'll keep this blog as an archive, but there won't be any further posts.

Rebooting the campus map

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 13:54:00 +0000

We launched the first version of the interactive campus map back in 2012, and though we’ve made lots of improvements to it over the years, we felt it was time to give it a complete overhaul.

The new map

You can view the new map at www.york.ac.uk/map

We’ve introduced a number of new features, including:

Larger map

The map is now the full width of the screen. When you open the map, it’s focused on Campus East and Campus West. You can drag the map to move it around, or use the buttons on the right to centre in on Campus East, Campus West or King’s Manor.

The new map

Navigation by search and buttons

Whereas before you could only search for room codes, the new search allows you to find a range of locations, including buildings, departments and rooms, and facilities such as baby changing and car parks. Start typing a location, and then select from the dropdown list of closest matches.

Across the bottom of the screen are buttons for facilities, allowing you to see car parks, cafes, post boxes and so on at a glance. The buttons let you view more than one location at the same time. So, for example, you can search for a building and then locate the car parks that are nearby. You can also have multiple buttons selected at once, should you wish to view shops and cash machines at the same time.

We chose the button types by asking 25 volunteers to pick the facilities that they’d most like to see feature prominently on the campus map. We also took into account that some important facilities may not feature highly, such as baby changing facilities and prayer rooms, and we made sure they can be found via the search instead.

One area we were particularly keen to improve was car parking. All car parks are now displayed on the map, rather than just pay & display and short stay, and we’ve added in additional information such as number of spaces, and RingGo location numbers.

Mobile friendly

Mobile view

The new map has been designed to work on tablets and phones, making it easier to find the places you need when you’re out and about.

You’ll notice you can still access the facilities buttons, but they’re hidden at the bottom of the screen until you need them.

Future improvements

There are still a number of areas that we’re keen to work on:

Walking and cycling directions between two points on the map
Expanding the transport information to include bike racks, bike pumps, and perhaps live bus data
At the moment, the room locations include directions to the room, but we’re only able to drop the pin on the building, rather than the exact location. We’re keen to be able to include more detailed room data using the precise coordinates.

Please take a look at the map, and feel free to leave any feedback either here, or using the feedback button on the map.

Our new homepage

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 12:10:00 +0000

After lots of design iterations, development work and usability testing, we’re pleased to say that the new version of our homepage is now live.

The homepage now uses the same new responsive design as the study and research areas of the site, so it’s optimised to work across a range of device sizes from small phone screens to large desktop monitors.

The homepage is optimised to work across a range of device sizes

As well as the change to how the page looks, we’ve also made changes to the content of the page and the navigation that surrounds it. This includes:

More links for internal audiences
We used data from Google Analytics to look at what staff and students were searching for when they visited the homepage. As a result we’ve added several links that haven’t been included on the homepage before, such as timetables and the library. These can all be found under the ‘Staff and students’ menu at the top of the page.

More content about campus and city life
In the previous design there were only four slots available to feature content in, which were also used to feature news and events, so campus and city life could only be included from time to time. This is very important content for prospective students, and we’ve put a lot of effort into revamping our student life content recently, so we decided to give it a dedicated space.

More links to factual content
Lots of visitors to our site just want to find answers to basic queries like when our term dates are, or how to get to campus, so we’ve added these too.

Behind the scenes, we’re using a new system that makes it easier for us to manage the content (Contentful, for those of you that are interested). We’ve also produced a content guide, to help us ensure that any everything we put up is on-brand and conveying the right message.

Updates to pages for current students

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 14:19:00 +0000

Just in time for the start of term, we've updated our pages for current students using the quick fix mobile-optimised redesign.

The pages now look smarter and are easier to use on the mobiles and tablets which account for over a third of their pageviews.

Old style

New style

Removal of personalised content

In addition to the design changes, we've also redeveloped the student homepage. Viewers of that page used to see just a large button inviting them to log in, but 80% didn't do so. We've removed that login option so that everyone gets straight to the news and content that they need.

Removing the login option does mean we've had to remove the personalised elements of the page for now, including timetable and library widgets. Usage data showed that these were very lightly used though so the cost of maintaining them didn't seem justified by the limited use.

Feedback

This has been a quick-turnaround project, so while it's a great step forward there may be room for more improvement. Comments are welcome here on the blog or through the feedback form on the web pages themselves.

Guerrilla usability testing at our open days

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 11:12:00 +0000

With thousands of potential students descending on campus for our open days last week, we had an ideal opportunity to get out ‘into the wild’ and carry out some guerrilla usability testing on the recently launched study at York pages, our new course pages, and a new homepage design that we’re working on

What’s different about guerrilla testing?

In guerrilla usability testing there isn’t a recruitment or screening process to find participants, you’re basically walking up to willing-looking strangers and asking if they’ve got a few minutes to spare. The tests can take place anywhere that you can find people - coffee shops, train stations, shopping centres, etc. Open days are ideal because everyone who comes to campus is going to be in our target demographic!

How we did it

Although guerrilla usability testing is a lot less formal than a lab-style usability test, we still used a script (cribbed from Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy) to make sure that our introductions covered the basics of who we were, what we were doing, how long it would take, and perhaps most importantly, that we would reward participants with chocolate.

Essential supplies for a bit of guerrilla website usability testing at #YorkOpenDay!

A photo posted by Paul Kelly (@itspaulkelly) on Jun 24, 2016 at 8:38am PDT

Before we got our participants to use the site, we asked them a few questions about the course they were hoping to study and what specific bits of information that they’d look for to help them decide if a course was right for them. We then asked them about other factors that would influence their decision to apply to a particular university. Based on their responses we came up with some scenarios on the fly.

What we tested

Over the course of the two open days we ran 17 tests, using both laptops and phones. Each test took around 10 minutes.

As well as course information, our participants looked for information on accommodation, the college system, the city, sport, societies and nightlife.

What we learned

Everyone likes a Yorkie bar!
Overall our participants were able to complete all the tasks that we gave them and liked the look of our redeveloped pages.
It was reassuring to see a lot of our assumptions validated, especially on our new course pages (eg BA Politics) - students found it easy to tell what they’d be studying each year, and really liked seeing authentic quotes from current students.
We got a lot of positive feedback about the in-progress new homepage design, with students liking how it looked, finding it “professional” and “welcoming”. One area that caused some confusion was the section on research, so we’ll be refining that further to make it clearer.
We found a few small bugs to fix with how the site works on mobile. It’s on our roadmap to set up a device lab so that we’ll be able to catch things like this sooner.
Several students used the main site search (rather than the course search) to find courses, which resulted in a much less direct path. There’s some work to be done to see how we can improve that.

We’ll definitely be doing this again. As well as the value of the testing itself, it’s always great to get out of the office and meet the users of our site.

Responsive quick-fix: rollout updates

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 12:17:00 +0000

We're making good progress with departments who are keen to adopt our new responsive quick-fix designs.

In addition to the About the University pages, the new designs have been applied to Electronics, TFTV and the Humanities Research Centre, as well as Alcuin College, the Ron Cooke Hub and Campus Food and Bars.

This chart shows the growing scope of the quick-fix rollout project, the pages currently being checked and total number of pages with the new designs applied:

If you're interested in moving your departmental pages into a responsive layout then contact us at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk and get started.

Revamping our student life content

noreply@blogger.com (Tasha Kidd) — Fri, 06 May 2016 12:41:00 +0000

We've recently launched our brand new student life content for prospective students. The content hadn't been overhauled since 2011, so it was definitely due a refresh.

The aim of the new content is to show prospective students the fantastic experience on offer at York, not just on campus but also in our amazing city. We also want to illustrate that getting immersed in campus life isn't just about fun and meeting people - it's also about improving skills and employability. We're demonstrating these things with lots of examples of student activities, alongside student stories and rich imagery.

Amplifying the student voice is a key part of the project. We want to give the student perspective (which is of course what prospective students want) and we want to increase engagement with our student blogs - also new this recruitment cycle. So look out for student quotes and blog excerpts dotted throughout the content.

This is what the landing page looked like before the changes...

And here it is now...

As you can see we've got some graphical key facts about the University, an opening quote from Ben, the YUSU president; followed by image rich highlights of what's on offer. You can also see some of the latest student blogs posts and further down the page information about the various support mechanisms.

This is the new culture and entertainment page, which includes lots of compelling examples of what's on offer, backed up with the student view.

There are plenty more pages to look at, so feel free to peruse the new content at your leisure.

Not only have we completely refreshed the content, we've also used our shiny, new 'device friendly' templates. This means the content resizes dynamically for desktops, tablets and mobiles. This is part of an ongoing project which involves moving all our content for prospective students into the new design. Although I should say, it isn't as simple as just moving the content - the content has been reviewed, rewritten and restructured to give a better and more consistent user experience. So far we've redeveloped the undergraduate, postgraduate, accommodation and student life sections. At the moment we're working on the international students section.

As with all our content development projects it's been a collaborative process. We couldn't redevelop our content without the expertise and knowledge of our subject matter experts. For this project we've worked with our fantastic student intern Katie, who's been keeping us on track in terms of the student view. YUSU have also been involved in reviewing the content which has been a really valuable part of the process. And last but not least our colleagues in student support have also helped with checking content and providing information.

In terms of measuring success, our overarching goals are to increase engagement with the content and improve perceptions about York student life. So we've set various measurable goals to see if we achieve this. For example, we ran a survey with currents students about the old content and we're doing the same survey for the new content, so we can measure students' perceptions of the content. You can find out more on the Wiki page about the project.

If you have any student life content featured in your department pages, we would be grateful if you could replace it with a link to the new content.

Finally, if you have any feedback on the new content you can let us know at: digital-marketing@york.ac.uk or via the comments below.

Introducing the new University image library

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Fri, 06 May 2016 10:42:00 +0000

We're pleased to introduce the new University image library, an online collection of 10,000+ photos of campus, the city and university life.

All staff can access the full collection of images and use pictures for a variety of print and online purposes. You can browse by category, search by keyword and even check picture locations on a map. As you find images you'd like to use, you can collect them in a 'lightbox' which you can collaborate on with colleagues. Once you've made your selection, you can download full-resolution copies.

Non-staff, including external users, can access a smaller collection of images available to all.

Get started at images.york.ac.uk and take a look at our user guide and tips to help you make the most of the system.

We'd welcome comments via our feedback form. If you've any questions you can get in touch as always at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk.

Using segments in Google Analytics to identify external users

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Tue, 03 May 2016 14:44:00 +0000

As Google Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik frequently points out, "All data in aggregate is cr*p", and if you want to get anything useful out of it you need to segment it.

For us, a fairly simple-sounding bit of segmentation is to look at how external users use our site compared to our internal audience of staff and students.

Although we can segment quite easily based on whether a user was on campus or not, that doesn’t give us a completely clear picture, as staff and students both frequently access our site from off-campus. Students use it from private rented accommodation and when they’re away from York during vacations, and staff use the site from home and when travelling on university business too.

Our new approach is to try to infer whether someone is an internal user or not based on factors such as the content they look at and the things that they search for.

Our 'Probably an external user' segment

Some of the conditions used to identify external users

So to try to identify external users, we've got an advanced segment is set to exclude sessions that meet any of the following criteria:

We're the service provider

An easy one to start with - exclude any sessions where the service provider is University of York.

Looked at pages that only internal users can see

Another easy one: exclude any pages that are behind authentication, which users wouldn’t be able to access without logging in. For example, the Timetabling Gateway or Student Enquiry System.

Looked at pages that that are aimed at internal users

This one is less clear cut as we have a lot of internally focussed pages that are publicly accessible, so external users can end up viewing them, accidentally or otherwise. We also know that there are some cases where our information architecture isn’t quite right and we end up directing prospective students to information that’s in the current students branch.

But still, if someone looks at anything in www.york.ac.uk/staff and www.york.ac.uk/students then it’s a pretty good signal that they’re an internal users, so we exclude them. We’re also excluding any URLs that include the words intranet, internal or current-students (with some regular expressions to catch variants with and without hyphenation or an ‘s’ on the end).

Searched for things that internal users use

Again, it’s not 100% clear cut, but if someone searches for one of our internal systems then it’s likely that they’re a student or member of staff.

So we exclude any sessions where the user searched for things such as VLE, Moodle, eVision, VPN, email or Planon.

Using the segment

Here's how our audience overview looks with this segment applied (the orange line) compared to all of our traffic (the blue line):

It's not perfect (but that's not the point), but you can see right away that usage patterns are different, with much less of a drop-off at the weekend for external users.

Responsive 'quick-fix' live

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 16:15:00 +0000

In February we unveiled our plans for a responsive 'quick-fix' for key web pages. Our aim was to improve user experience across a range of devices, while avoiding the laborious process of rebuilding thousands of pages.

We're pleased to announce that the first pages to use the new designs went live at the end of March.

The About the University pages are now more usable on phones and tablets. They also present a more coherent user journey alongside the newly rebuilt Study branch.

We've begun to roll out these new templates to departments. Many are well underway checking existing pages to make sure they translate cleanly into the new designs.

If you're interested in moving your departmental pages into a responsive layout then contact us at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk to get started. You can even book time in our (very grandly named) Device Lab, to help speed the process along!

More information on responsive designs:

Introducing Digital Drop-ins

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 09:40:00 +0000

As we mentioned before Christmas, we’re planning to run a monthly clinic for CMS users and departmental marketing folk to ask us anything about their digital marketing.

The first Digital Drop-in will be next Monday, 29th February from 10am to 12pm. It will take place in V/122, the seminar room on the first floor of Vanbrugh. You can use our fantastic room search to see where it is on a map and to get directions.

If you have a question about how to plan for the new responsive templates, how best to organise your content or your community of web contributors, or anything else that you’d just like a chat about, sign up for an appointment.

The Digital Drop-ins aren’t replacing our usual support channels, so if you need some help with content in the CMS, you can call x4127 or email digital-marketing@york.ac.uk.

We have limited space available next Monday, so if you’d like some advice, sign up now and book your spot.

Preparing for and opting in to new responsive designs for CMS pages

noreply@blogger.com (Digital team) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 12:05:00 +0000

Before reading this post, hopefully you’ve been to the test site, toggled the responsive styles on, and had a look around. If not, see our accompanying post introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website.

If you create and maintain content on the university website you’ll hopefully want to know when we can put these styles live on your pages. This post describes what you and we need to do in order to do that.

Opting in

Departments and sections can opt in to adopt these new designs for their section of the site. There are a few criteria we need you to fulfill to be able to do this:

A commitment from you to check all the pages in your section of the site to ensure they display correctly (more details on this below). Note that we’re expecting to enable the new design at a root-section level rather than small sub-sections lower in the hierarchy (ie. all of a department’s pages will switch at once, not a few at a time).

If it’s really impossible for you to do this checking, and this will be a blocker to you adopting the new design, let us know. We’ll try to help in as many cases as we can.

Understanding that, for now, the new design doesn’t include departmental colours. Options for colour will be re-introduced in the future, but we don’t have a timescale for that yet.
Ensuring you have the backing of your department to make the change and the authority to sign it off before going live.

If you can meet those criteria and would like to get involved, get in touch at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk and we’ll add you to our list.

Testing your pages

Before we switch a section of the site to the new design, we’ll need you to check every page in that section and provide feedback on any issues you can see. We’ll provide tools and guidance to help you do this.

Once we kick off a project to switch your area of the site (but not yet - for now just have a look around and use the feedback tool to alert us to anything obvious that you spot), the kinds of things that you’ll need to check for on a page-by-page basis include:

Does it look right?
Ensure there isn’t any overlapping text, or strangely over- or undersize images. Check that the submenu is right and that your images are loading properly.
Is it working?
On many pages there are Twitter lists, scrolling banner images, tabs, accordion boxes or some other added functionality. Is this still working? Let us know if there is any unexpected or broken functionality.
Does the content read properly?
Part of the work we’ve done is to reorder the content slightly, in those cases where the content at the top of a column comes too far down the page. Scan through the content on the page and make sure it makes sense and is in the right order

We’re aware that some of you may be responsible for hundreds of pages in the CMS so this isn’t a trivial task. But if you split the site down into manageable chunks it’s possible to get it done in a relatively short time, and certainly much faster than rebuilding the pages in a new template. It’s also a good opportunity to make sure that the web pages you have are up-to-date, relevant and useful.

Next steps

If you’re interested in adopting the new design, here’s what should happen next:

Have a good look around your pages on the test server so you have a good understanding of what the change will look like.
Discuss the opportunity in your department and, if you need it, get the buy-in of your senior manager.
Let us know you’re interested and when you’d like to do the checking of your pages - email us at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk - and we’ll agree some dates to start on and aim to finish by.
You check your pages, give feedback on anything that’s broken and we either fix it or advise you on how to modify the content so that it works.
Once all pages are checked and signed off, we’ll apply the change to your live pages.

All of that might sound quite complex, but we think it should actually be fairly straightforward and we’re here to help. If you’d like to discuss it with us, feel free to call Dan on x2047, or look out for another blog post in the next few days about upcoming content clinics where you can come and chat in person.

Introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website

noreply@blogger.com (Digital team) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 12:04:00 +0000

Five years ago the proportion of people visiting the university’s website on a mobile or tablet device was just 2%. It’s now over 25%. The need for our website to work better on a range of different devices is obvious.

One of our aims for this year is to update the current site to be responsive: that is, to fit to whatever screen it is displayed on whether that’s a mobile, tablet or computer. We blogged before Christmas about our plans for rolling out new responsive page templates and what we’re introducing today is part 3 of that plan - an incremental improvement to existing pages that can be applied to all CMS pages.

The new study pages, as they appear on different sized devices

We’ve developed new styles for existing CMS-published web pages which do two key things. First, they now work better on smaller devices. Second, they incorporate new fonts and colours to make for more cohesive user journey around the site. At this time we haven’t incorporated departmental colours, but options for colour will follow in the future.

Give us your feedback

We have a test version of the website at which you can preview the new design and send us your feedback. To access the test site, which is available on the University network only (including via the VPN if you’re off site), go to the page you are interested in on the main website and replace the www in the website address with cmsmigrate. So, for instance, if you want to try out www.york.ac.uk/about/ you would change the address in your browser to read cmsmigrate.york.ac.uk/about/.

Once you’re on the test site and looking at a CMS-published page that’s affected by the new designs, you’ll see a toggle switch in the top right-hand corner. Clicking it will turn on the new styles for you.

If you make your browser window narrower or wider you’ll see the layout adapt to the size of the window.

If you visit cmsmigrate.york.ac.uk on a mobile or tablet and turn the new styles on you’ll see that the content automatically adapts to the size of the screen.

Have a look around and let us know if you spot any issues by clicking the ‘Leave Feedback’ button in the bottom right-hand corner.' We’d really value your input.

What next?

We’re hoping to start rolling out these new designs very soon on an opt-in basis for the different sections of the site. If you’re involved in maintaining your department’s web pages, we have a separate blog post for you about preparing for, testing and activating the new designs.

Rolling out responsive web templates

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 16:35:00 +0000

Early in 2015 we launched new research web pages, our first to be optimised to work on all devices. Since then we’ve launched new pages for prospective undergraduates, prospective postgraduates and we'll soon launch a new version of the homepage. At the same time we’ve been working with departments to rewrite and rebuild course pages.

This has been a long process for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's just complicated work that takes a while. Secondly, we're a very small team who have to keep the website up to date and manage a significant support load. Business-as-usual takes around two-thirds of our time which doesn't leave much resource available for new developments.

Many of you have been asking when you can have access to new templates in the CMS to allow you to rebuild your pages. This post is to let you know what's happening, why (regrettably) it's not quite as simple as just enabling some new templates and to explain what we’re doing about it.

Thoughts on how we manage the website

Two quick asides about terminology:

1. I use department throughout these notes as shorthand for all types of organisational unit.

2. I don't refer to department websites. Instead I refer to sections or pages of the site. When we hear from website users, they almost always refer to just the University website. We have a big website, but it's just one site and not many small ones. That's an important distinction. It signals a shift in mindset that we think is important as we continue to improve the website.

</asides>

In the seven years we've been using the Web CMS, we've given basic training to over 1,000 users. Those users have added over 50,000 pages to the site, often with little governance and as a result we now have a site with more content than we have resource to maintain. Most web professionals would say that sounds like a recipe for disaster. That we still have a usable site in that context is testament to the great efforts made by all those involved.

But, despite those great efforts, the site has considerable problems. It is littered with repetition, out of date information, broken links, broken layouts, huge image downloads, flabby writing, confusing navigation, missing calls to action and critical information lost amongst minutiae.

Modernising and optimising a site for mobile takes more than just applying a new design. It means fixing those underlying problems and streamlining the information we provide. It means we need a change of approach.

Described below are three areas of work, all interrelated, that take us in the right direction.

1. Centralised course listings

Course pages, for obvious reasons, are amongst the most important pages we publish. For some time we've been the only Russell Group university whose course information is only located in department pages. In many cases course discovery is difficult and in some cases impossible. We also recognise that there is a big burden on departments to maintain the quality of the course pages in their areas. Recent consumer protection guidance has made it more important than ever that we get this right.

To address this shortcoming, we've moved 50+ course listings from departmental to central mobile-optimised pages over the past year. These include courses from Departments of Mathematics, Philosophy, Environment and more. They've been rewritten from scratch to ensure the content is consistent, high quality and most importantly meets user needs. For ongoing maintenance, the central team apply any changes so that we maintain that quality and consistency whilst ensuring that departments continue to approve and sign-off on the published content.

We've relied on agencies to help with writing capacity throughout 2015. In the new year we intend to add a dedicated post to the team to speed up the process. Departments who have the resources to write their own course page drafts will also be able to do so and we will work with you to edit and put them in place.

The current crop of centralised course pages show a range of positive metrics in Google Analytics. We're confident that this is a really positive step forward for how we showcase our courses to prospective students.

2. Mobile-optimised designs for new pages

The new mobile-optimised designs are built on a completely new framework of code and CMS templates. We've followed the principles of atomic design to build a scalable system which should serve us well for a good number of years to come.

By mid-February we hope to make these new templates available for the creation of new sections of the site (eg. new research centres, standalone projects).

For existing sections of the site, there is a lot of work to do to move to the new designs, including (but not limited to):

Training in use of the new templates
Auditing existing pages, whether they are required and whether the CMS is the best place for them (the wiki is now a better choice for a lot of internal-facing information)
Rewriting and optimisation of all content so that it works effectively on devices of all sizes
Sourcing and preparation of new images so that they display correctly on devices of all sizes
Logistical planning for a seamless transfer from old pages to new

This is work that departments would struggle to do in isolation, but that our small team doesn't have the resources to support. Rather than focusing on big changes for a few departments, we suggest below a different approach for existing pages as our first priority.

3. An incremental improvement to all existing CMS pages

Given the amount of work involved in rebuilding 50,000+ pages from scratch, there's a compelling need to do something to modernise the site design and improve the mobile user experience in the short term.

To that end, we're working on a retro-fit solution to apply to existing pages in the CMS. It won't be zero-effort for departments, but it will be days, rather than weeks or months.

We hope to be ready to start deploying to early adopter departments in late March.

So what can you do right now?

I hope the above sets the scene and gives you a sense of what we're trying to achieve. But you may be wondering where it leaves you. What can you do right now?

Let us know if you're interested in centralising your course pages, using the new designs for new pages or piloting our retro-fit design. Please ensure you have the support of your department though. Successful outcomes depend on departments committing enough resources to see work through.
Fix the basics. Mobile-optimisation and modern design are important but it is just as important to ensure what we have already is the best it can be. Fix the dead links, optimise your landing pages, edit your text, highlight your calls to action, clarify your navigation. All those, and more, are just as fundamental to the page as the aesthetics of the design. We’ll be running content clinics each month from February onwards, during which you’ll be able to sit down with us and get some advice in this area. Sign up now if you’d like to be involved.
Let us know what your web governance structure is within your department; how you update, approve and manage your content. Check your entry on our site map wiki and update it if necessary. If you don't have a governance structure, consider defining one. It will help you manage your pages and help us to help you going forward. Again, if you’d like to know more about this come along to one of our content clinics and we’ll talk you through it.

Improving our communications

We recognise that whilst we’ve been doing all of this our communications regarding plans, priorities and direction of travel have fallen short. We’re sorry about that, and one of our priorities for 2016 is to put it right.

In the meantime, feel free to ask questions in the comments or to me directly (dan.wiggle@york.ac.uk) and I'll be happy to answer.

Digital screenings - learn with us every fortnight

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 15:01:00 +0000

Every fortnight on Wednesdays at 1.15pm we run screenings of webinars or recorded conference presentations about all things to do with digital comms. We do this to help keep our knowledge up to date and to provide a very informal opportunity to discuss new approaches to what we do.

Anyone is welcome to join us and we publish details of what's coming up on Twitter and on a wiki page (UoY only) in advance.

In the past we've learned about:

Workflow for responsive redesign projects
Pair writing for effective content creation
The future of social media marketing
User-centred photography
Using HTTPS for all website traffic

That's a pretty eclectic list, but that reflects the nature of what we do! We wouldn't expect most people to want to come every time, so feel free to drop in just occasionally.

This week we're going to learn about programmatic advertising. We'll be in Derwent College room D/L/049 and will start at 1.15pm sharp.

Using Google Analytics and other tools to visualise how our global navigation gets used

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Thu, 14 May 2015 12:12:00 +0000

One of the big challenges of a responsive design, especially for a large site like ours, is how to tackle navigation.

When you're designing for large screens there's a lot of horizontal space available, so you can include quite a lot of links without feeling that you're overcrowding the page.

Our header navigation is fairly typical of other university websites, with links to all the major areas of our site and links for our main audiences.

Our header contains 15 links and a search box

Counting the links, there are 15 in total, plus a search box. Here's the full list:

Homepage (via logo)
Study
Research
Business
Departments
International
About
News
Events
Contact
Jobs
Visitors
Alumni
Current students
Staff

So, how do we fit all of these links in to a design that's going to work on small screens? Actually, let's take a step back and look at a different question: do we need all of these links in the first place?

Looking at the numbers

Taking inspiration from the GDS post on 7 ways we’ve used Google Analytics ‘outside the box’, I wanted to get an idea of how our users are moving between the main parts of our website, and whether they were using the global navigation links that we provide in our headers.

Google Analytics isn't great at answering this type of question directly, so first of all I exported a load of data using Supermetrics Data Grabber for Excel, looking at what the sources of traffic were to all of the pages that are available in our global navigation.

Configuring a report in Supermetrics Data Grabber

I grabbed the data for the whole of last year so that any seasonal variations were taken into account. Supermetrics Data Grabber can handily download unsampled data, which is another problem that Google Analytics has when you try to look at big picture problems over a long time period.

Some of the raw data - not pretty (yet)

I then started to clean up the data, replacing the path names with plain English labels and adding values to show what level in the hierarchy we were looking at.

This is already quite useful, and allows me to quickly answer questions that would be time consuming in Analytics.

For example, if I wanted to see how many pageviews the staff homepage gets that come from either the Study or Research branches, I just need to tick a few boxes and Excel's filters take care of the rest. (If you're interested, the answer is 4,450).

Excel's filters are a quick way of segmenting traffic

Pivoting

We can then go a step further and put this data into a pivot table.

The table below shows branches of our site along the top, and the pages that are available from our global navigation down the side, so we can see how much traffic is going from one area of the site to another.

Expressing these numbers as percentages and applying some conditional formatting lets us see some patterns. Right away we can see how the homepage is acting as a major jumping-off point to the other areas of the site (which shouldn't come as a surprise).

Patterns begin to emerge

We can also see which parts of the site have strong linkages between them, and where the links are weaker.

What next?

We're still making sense of this data, and are looking at other sources such as CrazyEgg and search logs, but we're getting the strong feeling that we don't need to provide as many global navigation options as we do currently, and certainly not as prominently. The homepage is the exception to this as it's a starting point for a diverse range of users, but most of the time it's more important to present users with links related to the content that they're looking it rather than links to completely different areas of the site.

The return of Show and tell - find out what we're up to...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 09:45:00 +0000

After a brief hiatus Show and tell returns next week with an extended format - not only can you get to see and hear what's happening in the world of digital you'll also have the opportunity to get updates in relation to print, internal communications and all things marketing.

This extended format follows our restructure which took place in January. Our former Internal Communications, Editorial and Creative Content and Student Recruitment Marketing teams merged with Digital and together we now form the Strategic Marketing and Digital Communications team. We've got lots of exciting things planned and many already in development so do come along to our Show and tell sessions and find out what we're up to.

Our next session is scheduled for Monday 9 March - 10:30 in D/056 Derwent and we’ll have four sessions on the following topics:

Insights from this years focus groups - Ali Sherratt
What did our brand perception research tell us? - Alison Kerwin
Student communications: insights from our competitors - Christine Comrie
Recent photoshoots by John Houlihan and Mark Woodward - Jilly Lovett and Dodi Beardshaw

As always keep an eye on our wiki (staff only) for details of future events.

We hope to see you there.

Updating the campus map

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 15:48:00 +0000

The interactive campus map was launched a couple of years ago, and one of the first things I was assigned to do was to update it a little bit. In particular, we wanted to be able to deep link to individual points the map and to have more information about a site pop up when you click on the markers.

Deep linking will make it easier for locations around campus to link to the map with their location highlighted. It's been requested from a few places so I'm happy to say it's now in place. When you click on an individual building you'll see that the URL in the address bar updates with a hash reference at the end (the "#heslington-hall" bit in https://www.york.ac.uk/about/maps/campus/#heslington-hall). Going directly to that URL will open the map zoomed in with a marker dropped in that particular spot.

The information pop-ups currently display the name of the location, which is handy when you're looking at all the cafes around campus and need to know which one you're looking at! We're getting some ideas about what other information would be useful to include in the pop-up. If you've got any ideas, let us know in the comments below.

We've got lots more plans for the map, including a location search and room search to make it even more useful for students, visitors and staff. Watch this space over the next few weeks!

You (auto)complete me

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 14:47:00 +0000

Following on from the introduction of our new search engine last month, we've just rolled out a new feature to help make searching our website easier.

Searches from the homepage and other top-level parts of the website (Study, Research, etc) now show autocomplete suggestions once you've typed in the first few letters of your query.

Clicking a suggestion will take you to the search results for that term. The suggestions all match content that appears on our website, so the results you get should always be relevant.

Happy searching!

New Starter - Chris Marsh

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 16:48:00 +0000

I've just started in the Digital team as a Front-end Web Developer - writing HTML, CSS and Javascript. My background is working for web agencies, developing sites and delivering to clients. It will be a huge change to work on a single website, but I'm looking forward to it.

We've got huge plans for updating the design, structure and deployment of the UoY website, and I've got a lot of ideas about the role the Digital team will play in this exciting new phase.

I'm an alumnus of the University, although it's nearly 15 years since I graduated. It's great to be back and I'm looking forward to getting reacquainted with life on campus.

Our new search engine

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 16:59:00 +0000

You may have noticed that searching on the University website has become a lot better recently. This is down to the fact that we launched our new search engine this week, replacing our old Google Mini solution with Funnelback.

What's new?

While we've kept the design of the search mostly the same as it was before, a lot has changed behind the scenes that means that search results should be more relevant and come back a lot quicker. The new search is a lot better at dealing with misspellings - of which we see a lot in our search logs, especially when it comes to words like 'accommodation', which is spelled incorrectly as many times as it's spelled correctly.

A couple of our favourite new features include:

Autocomplete

As soon as you start typing your query you'll see suggestions for searches that match content on our site.

This currently is only enabled for searches carried out from york.ac.uk/search, but we'll soon be adding it to search boxes on the rest of the site too.

Document type filtering

If you know that you're looking for a file of a particular type, the document filter on the right hand side will allow you to narrow down your search.

Sprint notes for sprint 31 - new research pages, study content improvements, search engines

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 16:35:00 +0000

Research pages

We've been working with an external agency on a redesign of our research pages, to be launched early next year. So far we've had a collaborative sketching session where we explored ideas for the research homepage, and the agency have delivered a set of wireframes which we've given feedback on. We'll be receiving the finished designs later this week, and then quickly moving on to implementation and content population.

Study web content

Country pages for international students - Tasha has been populating the new first batch of the new country pages, which will be live in sprint 32.
Digital style guide - the team has all fed back on the guide, which will be available to view on the wiki shortly after some final amends.
Prioritising our projects - we've agreed a list with Student Recruitment and Admissions for which aspects of the study web content we're going to be working on next.
Course finder audit - Tasha has been making sure that all of the results in our course search link to actual course pages (some link to department homepages) and Paul has been reviewing the search terms that people enter that don't return any results.

New search engine

Dan and Paul met with Funnelback, who will be providing the new search engine for our website. Funnelback are currently setting up the software, and we plan to launch in early December.

Embiggening the campus map

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 16:37:00 +0000

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a small addition to the online campus map: you can now switch the map to full screen mode, allowing you to see a lot more of the campus at once.

Hopefully this will make it easier to navigate around our ever-expanding campus.

We know that there's still a lot of other functionality that you'd all like added to the map - like being able to search for rooms and buildings - we're hoping to work on some more of these kinds of features in our upcoming sprints, so stay tuned.

This week's screening: Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 15:40:00 +0000

Next up in our regular series of lunchtime digital screenings is a usability test demo by Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability and Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems (both essential reading!).

In this short video (25 minutes) Steve will run through an example usability test - if you've ever thought of running a usability test yourself but aren't sure what types of questions to ask, this is a great place to start.

Everyone welcome, feel free to join us in HG17 Heslington Hall this Wednesday at 1pm.

Sprint notes for sprint 30

noreply@blogger.com (Digital team) — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 16:06:00 +0000

Course pages

Paul's work coding the newly designed course pages is close to completion, as is the first batch of content which is being developed. We're hoping the first pages will be ready to publish by the end of our next sprint (and we're quite excited!).

Digital content principles

As part of developing a consistent style for the University's digital content, Tasha has published six crucial digital content principles (internal only), available on our wiki pages.

A more detailed digital style guide is in the pipeline awaiting one final review.

Excellence Hub events

We've streamlined the process for adding Excellence Hub events, making it much easier for the Universities of Hull, Leeds, Sheffield and York to publicise events for high-achieving school and college students.

Currently there are 280 places available for subject taster sessions at York for students in years 7 - 11, and further sessions for sixth-formers at Sheffield and Hull. More events will be added throughout the year.

Site Manager survey

It's not too late to give us your feedback on the Web CMS! We'll keep the survey open until the end of the month, but don't delay, fill it in now!

Quick wins

Some of the smaller improvements we've made this sprint include:

Setting up the shortcuts you'd expect to be in place - e.g. york.ac.uk/hr. This should make a significant impact on the number of 404 errors we receive each month.
Moving more of the remaining old-style homepage layouts into the new multiple-columns format. It's so much easier to edit your columns!

And finally...

Don't forget to come to our Digital Screening and Show and Tell sessions (internal only), to learn more about what we've been up to.

Digital at the University of York

A new home for our blog posts

Rebooting the campus map

The new map

Larger map

Navigation by search and buttons

Mobile friendly

Future improvements

Our new homepage

Updates to pages for current students

Removal of personalised content

Feedback

Guerrilla usability testing at our open days

What’s different about guerrilla testing?

How we did it

What we tested

What we learned

Further reading

Responsive quick-fix: rollout updates

Revamping our student life content

Introducing the new University image library

Using segments in Google Analytics to identify external users

Our 'Probably an external user' segment

We're the service provider

Looked at pages that only internal users can see

Looked at pages that that are aimed at internal users

Searched for things that internal users use

Using the segment

Further reading

Responsive 'quick-fix' live

Introducing Digital Drop-ins

Preparing for and opting in to new responsive designs for CMS pages

Opting in

Testing your pages

Next steps

Introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website

Give us your feedback

What next?

Rolling out responsive web templates

Thoughts on how we manage the website

Two quick asides about terminology:

</asides>

1. Centralised course listings

2. Mobile-optimised designs for new pages

3. An incremental improvement to all existing CMS pages

So what can you do right now?

Improving our communications

Digital screenings - learn with us every fortnight

Using Google Analytics and other tools to visualise how our global navigation gets used

Looking at the numbers

Pivoting

What next?

The return of Show and tell - find out what we're up to...

Updating the campus map

You (auto)complete me

New Starter - Chris Marsh

Our new search engine

What's new?

Autocomplete

Document type filtering

Sprint notes for sprint 31 - new research pages, study content improvements, search engines

Research pages

Study web content

New search engine

Embiggening the campus map

This week's screening: Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug

Sprint notes for sprint 30

Course pages

Digital content principles

Excellence Hub events

Site Manager survey

Quick wins

And finally...