External Web Services – University of Florida Academic Health Center

Earlier this year I took a job as Web Content Optimizer for UF’s AHC, a job in which I help academic colleges and departments and hospital units with optimizing the content of their websites for search engines, analyze their sites for usability and accessibility issues, measure analytics and social media interaction, and assist with information architecture. Our office also maintains a blog for which all of us write – here’s what I wrote in 2011:

Union Design created a website for the model, built on the urban fantasy motif of twilight and dark elegant designs. The site showcases her modeling work, upcoming appearances, and her line of beauty lotions and creams based on the hit book and movie series.

Started by geography students doing research in Uganda, Books Open the World assists rural communities with building community libraries, and securing funding for training and employing librarians. In Europe and the United States, they run book drives to find the volumes to stock the shelves. They also fund scholarships for rural girls to continue into secondary education institutions.

Union Design & Photo works with Books Open the World by designing their web site and collateral materials. Their logo, seen here, builds of of patterns in native Ugandan art and embodies the promise of a brighter future through reading and education.

Union Design & Photo created an identity that built off the traditional wood cut art of the era. Based on the name and sign of an Irish pub that resonated with the owners, the design portrays a dove in mid-flight over a cornucopia, represented the wealth of surprises one would find in the client’s catalog of antiques.

In October I saddled up and ambled down Austin way to present and attend the Higher Education Web Professionals Association conference. Every year, the best and the brightest in web development, marketing, communications, and applications development come together to share their knowledge and insights, to present new ideas, and collaborate with one another in one of the most engaging and social groups I’ve experienced.

Over the next few days I’ll be live blogging for the HighEdWeb magazine, Link, as well as heavily tweeting about the sessions and writing my summaries here to share with the UF Academic Health Center.

What Robocop Can Teach Us About Alumni Engagement

I gave a presentation at the conference on using micro-donations as a tool for engaging the younger, less affluent alumni audiences that are typically ignored by Foundations in favor of alumni that can donate large sums of money. By exciting and involving these audiences, higher education institutions can create crowd-sourced campaigns that can do a lot of smaller scale social good in the local, targeted communities, meeting mst higher education institution’s mission of outreach.

Presentations Covered in Blog Posts

• Workshop: Creating and Maintaining Web Content
• Student Ambassador Programs (For Link: the Journal of the Higher Education Web Association)

My Top Five Professional Takeaways

1. Large-scale engagement doesn’t mean a lot of money. Seth Odell showed us the tremendous results that can be achieved with two people, a laptop, and a web cam. Why have a small event on campus that can invite a few dozen people when the potential exists for reaching hundreds of additional audience members online for very little extra effort?
2. Be sure, then go ahead. Karlyn Morissette exemplified Davy Crockett’s maxim in her presentation on the Insane Clown Posse. If you are sure of your target audience and what they want, and have a plan to reach them, execute that plan and stay true to it to the very end. Don’t let the naysayers derail the process – stay true and reap the rewards.
3. They aren’t prospective students. Doug Tschopp’s user analysis of incoming students showed that they don’t use the word prospective students – it’s not how they identify themselves. Find a better term for this: Become an Aggie, Join our School, Incoming Students, Come to UF – anything that actually resonates with your audience.
4. Personas aren’t an abstract concept. In the past, personas have always seemed to me to be a good concept but give limited time and resources it often had to be sacrificed to meet immediate needs. Now I realize they are a crucial benchmark we should all be using. Aaron Baker’s presentation on information architecture, user interaction and personas showed that creating well-rounded personas can keep your information architecture on track and focused and deflect institutional demands to add content and links that are not germane to the mission and target audience of the site.
5. Higher Education news and communications needs to be better – and there  is no excuse for not doing it. Georgy Cohen’s presentation on news in higher education talked about the traditional stumbling blocks in improving their presentation – time, money, resources – and how they are all hollow crutches. Newspapers have managed to make these changes in the last few years to remain competitive, and their budgets are not much better than those of higher education news units. By being smart and taking advantage of new and generally low cost options, every higher education news unit could present a robust online presence quickly and within their operational means.

My Top Five Social Takeaways

Another great advantage of the heweb convention is the tremendous social and networking opportunities it allows. heweb, capped at around 500 attendees, is still small enough to allow intimacy and the ability to meet a large number of people from various institutions.

1. The Tuesday Night Excursion. Where to begin? The evening began with performing in the Man in #000000 Johnny Cash tribute band with Aaron Rester, Tim Nekritz, Georgy Cohen, Lori Packer, Joel Goodman, Larry Falck, Kris Martin-Baker, and Mallory Wood. I sang I Surfed Everywhere and a rapping solo on Rebecca Black’s Friday. Followed by hours of karaoke – including the best Paradise by the Dashboard Light with Kerri Hicks – impromptu crowd-sourced singing of Friends in Low Places on the bus, and hours of singing at a piano bar. Finally, a rooftop performance by Guilty Pleasures. It was an epic night.
2. Practicing for the Man in #000000 on Monday night. Just a lot of friendly singing in a hotel room, followed by a hotel atrium performance of Seventy-Six Trombones. If you had already gone to dinner, you missed out.
3. Free form jazz and quiet conversation with Carl Lew on Thursday night, after dinner at Threadgill’s, viewing the bats, ice cream and beers and conversation with Dave Tyler, Mitsi McKee, and others.
4. Exploration of the Gypsy Food Truck Festival, followed by a Day of the Dead celebration and listening to Tish and the Mizzbehavin’ Band at the Chugging Monkey with many, many attendees.
5. Quiet moments stolen away to talk to Georgy and Rick Allen.

Conclusion

The Higher Ed Web Conference is a must for anyone involved in developing a web presence   – not just developers and designers, but content writers, strategists, and marketers.  2012 promises to be a big year for the Association, and I invite you all to check it out.

Project GRACE is a ten year project aimed to eliminate homelessness in Alachua County. The program includes four different programs: Project Grace, the core project offering resources to homeless; Grace Marketplace, a one-stop center providing job education and placement opportunities; Grace Housing Trust, which works with local builders and property owners to find temporary housing, and Faces of Grace, which brings the homeless in as speakers to local businesses and organizations.

Union Design designed a comprehensive identity system for all aspects of the Grace program, including a website for disseminating information about the program.

Visit the website

Crosstown’s principal, Georgy Cohen, wanted an identity that spoke on several levels. First, she wanted the design to convey the idea of connecting audiences to content, and the channel of communication between the two. Secondly, she wanted a design that built on the iconic signage of the Boston transit system.

One of the cardinal sins of web designers is developing a web interface that is too artistic or clever to be functional. It’s an easy trap to fall into – we get too obsessed with something new and shiny, and not how usable it is for the end audience.

A prime example of this is the Australasian Writers and Art Directors Association showcase website, which showcaes award winning advertising design for the year in the region. The design uses a navigation system which Vince Flanders defined as “Mystery Meat Navigation” – links with no contextual clues unless you mouse over them. In this case, each entry is represented by a slowly moving dot that expands to show the award winning entry if clicked on.

The site does have a more traditional menu, but this is only rendered if one clicks within the loose central circle, and then still appears as circular text, meaning some link titles are upside down.

Now Vince would tell us that this site falls into a realm of vanity site that is unaccountable for goals, such as a movie site which exists only to promote a film in theaters. But it should be more than that. Shouldn’t a show reel for the best that the advertising community has to offer be easily searchable by anyone with a rudimentary level of web skills? The easier and straightforward the navigation, the easier it is for the head of a company or marketing department to look through the examples and find a company that meets their immediate needs. A clever, unintuitive interface gums up the process of discovery and consequentially makes this site useless in bringing new clientele to the companies involved.

For about $4,000, Mallory built an online ambassador program at St. Michael’s that eventually connected with 9 out of 10 incoming students.

An online ambassador has to be passionate about your institution and in talking with others.  They have to be comfortable with technology – but not someone who is closeted away with a computer. They need to be INVOLVED and CONNECTED on campus – student leaders, student government representatives, and club presidents. Content needs to be aware – authentic, well-connected, and avant-garde.

For more, please read the write up on Mallory’s presentation I wrote for Link: the Journal for Higher Education Professionals.

To start the official portion of the Higher Education Web Professionals conference I attended a workshop on generating ideas on developing and maintaining web content. Doug Tschopp, the Director of the Entreprenurial Center at Augustana College in Illinois, led a group of designers, writers, editors, and social media managers on the issues facing higher education institutions wanting to create compelling content for their web presences.

Here are some of the takeaways I took form our discussion:

• Never look at something twice if you can do it once.
• Remember that you can’t please and serve all audiences effectively. Know your primary audience, build your site to their needs, and use secondary navigation elements to address secondary audiences.
• Shopping for a Higher Education institution is different than all other online shopping experiences. Students start with all of their options in their basket. With so many items in the shopping basket, initial decisions to remove institutions are made impulsively and arbitrarily. A poor web presence or user experience can remove you from consideration even before the student critically looks at you as a viable candidate, which can kill a smaller institution with a finite pool of available potential students.
• Individuals are more likely to fill out a form than they are to send an email to you. If they encounter a problem with their email system, the institution is invariably blamed even if it not their fault.

In the second portion of the workshop, Doug shared with us the results of a card sort he did of incoming students to help determine the information architecture for Augustana’s redesign. The results were intriguing:

• About: Students did not identify with About. They almost always chose to call the material in an about section General Information. For these students, About is a subset of General Information, and should be reserved for the introductory test of an about us section, not a massive category that includes maps, directions, etc.
• General Information bucks the trend of task-based navigation: Although the general trend for navigation is to move towards task-based categories, this reference area tends to stay categorical in student’s minds.
• All of the students discarded Prospective Students as a category bucket for information. Although this is common terminology in higher education for potential students, it is not a category that they self-identify with. Think of another term – for instance Texas A&M uses “Become a Longhorn” for this category in their navigation.
• Other terms that meant nothing to students and were discarded: FAQ, Intramurals, Computing Services.