Web Publishers’ Community – January update
This month’s WPC session focused on remote user testing in EdWeb, our search procurement project and using the Handlebars JS Framework.
Web Publishers’ Community January 2017 presentation slides
EdWeb CMS Update – Bruce Darby
In the first half, Bruce spoke about the upcoming plans for script support and social media and visitor feedback.
Script support
Funded by the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences and Communications & Marketing, EdWeb script support will make pages more interactive and allow for:
- Event tracking through Google Analytics
- Live chat features
- Dotmailer sign-up forms
The scripts can be enabled on pages, whole sites or widgets within pages.
We hope to deploy script support soon, but we first need to close our investigation of the ongoing infrastructure issues we’ve been seeing in EdWeb.
Social media & visitor feedback
We’ve been using the Kano model to plan and prioritise our development of social media sharing and visitor feedback features.
Read Neil Allison’s blog post on how we’re using the Kano model
Our initial plan for social media sharing is to include sharing buttons for:
These could be set from the homepage for the whole site and would sit at the bottom of the page. Future developments would allow web publishers to set social share buttons on a page-by-page basis and include more channels.
We’re hoping to release the social share function in April/May and visitor feedback sometime in the summer.
Social media sharing and visitor feedback wiki page
Technical update
Bruce included a technical CMS update in the second half, focusing on how we’re shaping the future of EdWeb developments.
Our own tech team will start to take on EdWeb development work, beginning with social media sharing and visitor feedback.
Development will also continue in our Code Sprints. We had another successful Sprint in November and will be having another one in the next few months.
Together, these form part of our EdWeb Collaborative Framework. The Framework allows us to tap into the talent pool across the University, enables innovation and promotes a sense share ownership.
New opportunities for user insight in EdWeb – Neil Allison
Neil took us through the new user testing opportunities that will be available once script support is in EdWeb.
This includes remote testing tool Loop11, which we hope to pilot soon. Loop11 allows web publishers to set up test for users to complete on their site. You can then view a variety of analytics from completion rates to length of time on tasks. Take a look at what Loop11 can do for you by watching the introduction video below.
Remote testing is a quick and cheap alternative to in-person usability tests. Before analysing visitor behaviour and attitudes, though, make sure you and your stakeholders have a clear answer to why your digital presence exists and what you want your audiences to do. Only by knowing the ‘why’ can you glean actionable insights from testing.
Read our blog posts on usability testing
Mini workshop: Scenarios to inform website search procurement – Neil Allison
As we are about to embark on the process of procuring a new website search, Neil led a workshop where we all created and prioritised scenarios where someone would be using our internal search facility. Potential vendors will use these scenarios to demonstrate how their product can best cater to our needs.
You can see the different scenarios that were created on the WPC wiki page for January 2017.
Before creating the scenarios, Neil took us through some of the different factors that affect search behaviour. These include:
- Domain expertise- a user’s familiarity with what they are searching
- Search experience- knowing search engine capabilities
- Cognitive style- those who build a broad level of understand across topics (global thinkers) versus those who dive right into a single topic (analytical thinkers)
- Goal type- navigational searches to reach a particular location versus information searches to seek out documents related to a topic versus transactional searches to accomplish something online
Read our blog posts on search procurement
Giving EdWeb ‘Handlebars’ – Billy Wardrop
In the final presentation, Billy took us through how to use the Handlebars JS Framework to pull data into EdWeb without a proxy in sight.
Handlebars is an extension of the Mustache templating language and is compatible with major browsers.
Billy gave us a demo of how to use it to pull in employee details into an EdWeb page.
Upcoming WPC
Join us at our next Web Publishers’ Community on Wednesday, 1 March.
