Matt Hampel | matth.org

Michigan Marketing and Design responded fast to Jacob Nielsen’s post on all-caps, right-justified navigation (the RC hasn’t, yet…)

I’m surprised he didn’t mention the 50 pixels of wasted space on either side of the navigation (highlighted green in the image below). Whitespace is necessary, I understand, but in this case it could be well used to increase the font size (and therefore readability) significantly.

A post on the University of Michigan’s Community Information Corps (CIC) website announces the launch of Open.Michigan.

The CIC is a place for School of Information folks that “provides students with readings, lectures, practical engagement service opportunities, research projects and social and professional networking connections to launch them into careers as public interest information professionals”

Here is the Open.Michigan homepage. From this screenshot, what is the purpose of the site?

Heaven knows.

Design lesson: explain the purpose of the site on the homepage. “Connecting the global learning community” is not a sufficient explanation.

Ostensibly, it:

represents the diverse collection of Open initiatives on campus - from open access publishing and open archives to open source software and open standards. The site provides greater visibility to the various projects and attempts to expand the dialogue between campus participants and external collaborators.

That is not really a global learning community. It’s an internal site for the people who are already in the system. Cf. the text of the about page, which (unlike the homepage) actually says what the project is about:

Open.Michigan provides a clear view of the many places and ways U-M contributes to our world’s knowledge

…

the U-M Health Sciences Global Access project and the dScribe project; in open source software, the Sakai and SiteMaker projects; in open archives and publishing, Deep Blue, digitalculturebooks, MBooks, and OAIster projects; and in open standards, the IMS Global Learning Consortium work and conferences.

Do you know what any of that stuff is? Browse further, and woah, you’ll actually learn! I’m not quite sure that the site is so much a “part of an emerging paradigm for participatory education on a global scale” as it is a static collection of project abstracts, but it’s a start. A first prod at some sort of aggregation at Michigan, and a laudable one.

Some of the descriptions need a buzzword pruning, though:

This new program will combine continuous, formative and summative assessment of higher order educational outcomes with flexible learning paths for achievement in nine defined competency domains.

One thing interesting from the introductory post on the CIC is a link to a Wiki on some bizzaro Med School server that has lots of training documents. Of note: we learn that rich presentations are converted into (get this) JPEGs for dissemination through Open Courseware. Beautiful, and very Michigan.

I wanted to think out loud about the information architecture of the RC site. Probably not interesting to you, but a valuable exercise for me, and I don’t apologize.

It’s bad right now, for many reasons.

One is that since everything is in  the left column and not well delineated,  you get a nasty mess of links once you’re a couple levels down in the site. And that nasty mess exists on every page — it’s not pulled from a template.

But what really irks me are the large categories. I wasn’t a part of the initial design process, but it looks like some misguided notion of personas was pushed. But this isn’t a strict B2B site or intranet where all users have well-defined roles. Prospective students want to know what classes the RC offers and what groups exist, as do alumni, staff, and friends; but that information is, illogically, all under “current students”. And “about the rc” is found under “prospective students”. Arg.

I’m not in a position to completely rewrite those categories yet, but a stab in the right direction would probably look very traditional:

• about
• academics
• rc life (players, benz, )
• rc community (gallery, PALMA, SLIP, urban org)
• alumni
• calendar / news

But with cleverer nouns.

Even that raises problems; where does EQMC go, or internship listings?

Where to put the top-level navigation is even trickier. In the end, it’ll go up horizontally at the top. That seems inevitable. But then  we’ll have another Cornell / UChicago / Community High. Boring! (but usable?)
Don’t get me started on the file structure — it’s flat, and everything’s in one folder. That’s actually a good thing, as we get ready to move to a platform that supports a large amount of open source software — there’ll be less fiddling to do. At the same time, it means that (with some grunt work) we can reorganize the navigation — without worrying about moving files into different folders, which would break links and cause a whole different set of problems.

Craig sends it an email like this:

“Matt will update the photos and captions on the homepage by Tuesday. Here are the files he needs: [attachments]”

And I get an email right away (and whenever else I want) that says:

“Update the photos  and captions on the homepage by Tuesday. Here are the files: [attachments]”

There would be a project page where I can log in and check all that stuff, since I lost all those emails and then turned off notifications for a week.

When I’m done, I just send it an email saying,

“I updated the homepage. Took 1 hour. Craig now needs to find new photos for next week”

And the system knows what I’m talking about.

The Cornell Redesign Blog, a valuable resource for anyone in academic digital development, is back as View Source. The writing retains its unified, entertaining voice and its plethora of embedded hints and strategy. Nice to once again hear from such a talented group of confirmed humans.

UM:

Real World:

That’s pretty much my job… bringing the Real World into the U of M.

You can define custom content types with custom fields using the CCK plugin –

BUT! you need a second plugin (”contemplate“) to define how they display, and that’s not obvious.

Even with that plugin, there are aspects of article display you still can’t change. I call this the “System wants to insert random crap effect“. It’s prevalent in most poorly thought-out systems.

Also, default URLs are yucky– if I’ve got a content-type called “projects”, entries should have urls of the form “/project/name”, like every other CMS, not “/node/112″. Sure, the latter is easier for the developers to implement… but really, who made that decision?

I still don’t understand why Drupal is so popular when many other systems “just get it” right out of the box.

[update] Here’s some code that Drupal produced today:

<div class="field field-type-text field-field-people">
<h3 class="field-label">People:</h3>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item"><?php print $field_people[0]['view'] ?></div>
</div></div>

What?!

Many UM undergraduate math classes have homework based entirely on the web — this semester, the dept. is actually looking to see if the system is working. This analytical spirit is rare, and I applaud it.

Here is the UROP project description (more on UROP later, hopefully I don’t have to file a FOIA request)

This [project] will specifically seek to answer the following research questions:

1. Do students spend more time working on the on-line homework than they do working written homework, and is this affected by the inclusion of the homework as a part of students’ course grade?

2. How does the use of on-line homework change the manner in which class-time is used?

3. Do students in classes using on-line homework perform better on the uniform exams in the course, and do they perform better on questions that specifically resemble homework problems in the course?

4. Do students in classes using on-line homework demonstrate better skills at finding antiderivatives and evaluating definite integrals?

5. Do students work a greater percentage of the homework when it is assigned as on-line homework instead of pencil-and-paper homework, and do they work on problems requiring greater thought when those problems are presented in the on-line format?

The U of M libraries have a multi-user Movable Type license and offer free blogs to UM students under a service called mBlog. There are quite a few mBlogs now, and a surprising number are blank or have been abandoned. (or perhaps this is the normal abandon rate for blogs?)

In any case, a couple are fairly interesting:

• WCBN posts its board meeting minutes with some regularity.
• Virtual Sites is an interesting new project that allows easy remote access to Umich apps. Sam (of ArborForums) posts occasional updates.
• The School of Nursing has actually branded their events blog. (only noteworthy because everyone else seems to stick with the good ol’ default layout. SI careers is branded, too)
• As with every blogging service, your favorite pills store is represented. (more spam blogs here, here, here, here, here, and here)
• There’s one about brownies. With weekly recipes.
• Someone we know posts about things with wings.
• There is no doubt that I often wondered if I was truly helping the students or just confusing them even more. But when their faces would glow with excitement everyday and they would pinch my cheeks lovingly…
• Human-powered submarine!!

Here are 4 search plugins for the Ann Arbor District Library catalog. They require Firefox 2.

• AADL by keyword — probably the most useful of the four, and perhaps the only one you need, since it searches several fields
• AADL by title
• AADL by author
• AADL by subject — this one is probably the least useful unless you are familiar with the AADL’s mutated Library of Congress taxonomy