Subject: 6/26 UWired Usability Committee Meeting Minutes


Next Meeting:  Monday, July 31
               9am-10am, Mary Gates Hall, Room 015L
               C&C Technical Communications Group hosting
               
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                       Minutes, Monday June 26
                            MGH 015L
                         
                        
Attending:  Rick Ells, Trevor Leffler, Judy Ramey, Carol Robinson, Mark Scott,
            Diane Sartorius, Kathryn Sharpe, Terry Wagner, Helene Williams

1. UWired Catalyst Site Redesign
   Trevor Leffler, Senior Computer Specialist UWired/PETTT
                      
   Basic design changes
     o Better text on the home page to describe at the beginning what the 
       topics were
     o Got rid of rollovers 
     o Use standard headers and footers throughout site
     o Added "I want to..." pulldown menu to speed navigation to 
       important things. Idea was picked up from the MSN site.
  
   Changes were guided by several sources of information
     o Usability study by Technical Communications students
     o Log of search terms, what were people looking for?
     o Page visit counts from server logs, which pages were most frequently 
       visited?
     o Email to UWired, mostly from faculty and staff. Students using the  
       Catalyst Tools sent in many email comments.
     o Comments from people visiting the Center for Teaching and Learning
       Technologies (CTLT) or taking UWired workshops.
    
   Behind the scenes, the new Catalyst site uses a MySQL database and 
     some Perl scripts to manage content, which is located on the
     depts.washington.edu server
     o Before the system was set up, authors put their content into HTML 
       templates, a system that resulted in much variation
     o The new system uses forms for entering content, which is placed into
       a database. Periodically, the actual HTML files are generated
       from the database contents using the Perl scripts.
     o Separating maintenance of the content from maintenance of the 
       templates means the templates can be changed easily. The site
       can then be regenerated using the updated templates.
     o The system also adds metatags on each page to aid in searching
     o Also working on an improved search engine for the site.
  
   Catalyst is working on some new tools.
     o Quick Poll 
     o Peer Review is being revised in response to many suggestions
  
2. PETTT working on several projects
   o Wants to develop a solution-in-box for people who want to 
     monitor site usage. Several alternatives are being explored,
     including purchasing an enterprise wide solution and developing
     software for sharing.
   o Studying how changes in the design of the Arthritis Source site 
     affect patterns of use of the site.
   o Exploring ways to do user feedback surveys. Encouraging people to 
     do surveys by giving them a chance in a lottery was shot down by
     Human Subjects Review. 
    
3. Technical Communications has drafts of the Web Heuristics articles
   available. The articles will appear in the August issue of Technical
   Communications. The drafts are available as Word documents at...

    http://www.uwtc.washington.edu/international/workshop/1999/post-workshop/
      download/articles.htm          

FINAL NOTE: Please send to Rick (rells@cac.washington.edu) the URLs of any 
  usability studies you have done and written up that are available on 
  the Web for others to see. The URLs will be added to the Usability Web 
  site to help us be aware of each other's great work. 


 |- Rick Ells - 543-2875 - rells@cac.washington.edu - Rm 301 4545 Bldg -|
 |-                http://staff.washington.edu/rells/                  -|