Two of the founders of the Refresh Detroit group will be hosting a “Usability Tweetup” in Ann Arbor at 7pm on Saturday, July 18th. I am an officer in the Refresh Detroit group and it is a great chance to meet other web workers in the Detroit area to talk about projects, skills and trends. As an informal group the setting is relaxed and inviting, hope you can join us!

• What: “Usability Tweetup”
• When: 7pm, Saturday, July 18, 2009
• Where: Ann Arbor Brewing Company in downtown Ann Arbor [Google map]
• Why: To discuss web usability, web accessibility, Twitter; socialize; drink beer

Note that this is the night of the last day of the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair.

This week has been crazy in the office. Although we have been pumping out sites and updates believe it or not there is more to come. Additions to the calendar for Welcome Back Week, FOCIS announcements and big things from the office of development. Stay tuned as we break it down for you.

In the mean time enjoy these links of the week.

• More than you ever want to see about encoding
• Install Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu with One Command [Linux]
• Graded Browser Support Update: Q3 2009
• The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube Culture and the Politics of Authenticity
• Why Web Projects Take So Damn Long
• Modernizr: HTML5 and CSS3 detection
• You’ve Got 20 Seconds Or Less to Live.
• How do you track time?
• People with passion fuel social media
• Old-School Marketing No Longer Working? Blame Canada
• Usability Tweetup in Ann Arbor, July 18
• Remember That Zoho Secret Launch? It’s Zoho Projects 2.0
• JSConf Talk: Games, Performance, TestSwarm
• Demos, tools and tutorials for the HTML canvas element – Canvas Demos
• PHP: PHP 5.3.0 Release Announcement
• Shirky’s Law

We are excited to announce the launch of the redesigned site for the Purchasing Department! Purchasing is one of four departments within Finance and Facilities Management. All four department sites and the main Finance and Facilities Management website underwent a major overhaul. The images above are a quick comparison of the old Purchasing site (left) vs. the redesign (right).

After speaking with the Purchasing Department and much discussion, the frustration with the old site stemmed down to “way too much information at once,” also know as information overload. While there was a lot of good information on the site, it was hard for the user to readily find the information important to them because of how it was being presented.

These were our major goals:

• To organize and group content to create a functioning information hierarchy that will increase the readability (scanning) of information that matters to the user.
• To redefine the identity of the Purchasing Department through branding and use of color to better inform the university community of what they do as well as instill who they are.
• To create a navigation that is easy to use and is intuitive for the user to quickly find the page they are looking for with pertinent information.

The new Purchasing Department site evokes a much calmer feeling compared to its old design. The use of space, images, color and reorganization of content immensely improved the user experience.

You can check out the site at: http://purchasing.wayne.edu/

We just launched the 2008 President’s Report Web site. This is the first time we have gone all digital with the report, no trees were harmed in the production of the site.

Some key features of the site include

• A video introduction for President Noren
• Rotating featured stories on the homepage
• Clear design the highlights our campus and students

Transitioning the report to a web site makes it more accessible and transparent. In the past it was created as a book and sent to alumni, donors and friends of the university. So if you wanted to see it you had to come to campus or request one. Now the whole report is live and searchable, a much better and cost effective approach.

This is just the first of may sites we have lined up to launch in July. Stay tuned for more announcements in the next few days.

Check out the site for yourself at: http://president.wayne.edu/report/

We would like to give a warm welcome to Jake Williams who started working in our department this week. He is a high school student who is taking part in the Biz Tech Summer Camp put on by the School of Business.

Jake will be helping us with managing web content and social media. It is also a great opportunity for him to shadow each of us as we work. Since our department acts as a mini agency within the university he will be able to see what it is like to run and work at a business.

He is interested in going to college for pre-law and eventually running his own business. I am sure you will be hearing from him soon.

C&IT recently launched a new dashboard for applicants to check their admission status. It allows them to see at a glance what they applied for, the items they completed and what they still have outstanding. I will post more about the actual dashboard later.

This morning I was presented with their default login page to bring into the Wayne State look and feel. I have included the before (left) and after (right) screenshots below.

Key Changes

• WSU header and footer were added to maintain consistency with the rest of the sites.
• Colors were changed to match WSU colors
• Layout completely changed to emphasize the login form
• Expanded instructions were all moved to the right with image indicators
• Page now validates and is ADA compliant

Overall the goal of the page is to get the student logged in and on their way as quickly as possible. Having clear visual cues and help instructions are key to making the page successful. I also added the phone number so they could talk to someone right away if they have questions.

Checkout the live login page at: http://appstatus.wayne.edu/

Its the first day of summer and Fathers Day. Not a ton going on this week but some great resources. No real theme, they seem to be all over the board. Enjoy.

• Rails Magazine Issue 3 – Print Edition Available
• MIT/Stanford/Syracuse Team Develop New PHP Intepreter-Based XSS and SQL Security Tester
• Symbol Signs Collection
• HTML 5 Takes Aim At Flash and Silverlight
• All the Small Icons You’ll Ever Need | Web Design Ledger
• Picasa for Higher Ed Image Management
• Alternate text in HTML 5
• Designing for Sign Up (video & slides)

We don’t usually tell the community when we are doing A/B testing so the results don’t get skewed. One recent one has been running for the past few weeks and it looks like its not going to end up with a conclusive result so we are stopping the test right now.

“Schools & Colleges” vs ”Academic Programs”

We are ever changing and refining the navigation for wayne.edu and over the past year of so many more universities have been changing their wording from “Schools & Colleges” to “Academic Programs”. That got us wondering, we thought academic programs had a more concise description of what is on the page behind the link. So we decided to try it out.

Technical Results

May 21 – June 15, 2009 (3 weeks)
126,433 Page Visitors
20,644 Conversions
16.33% Conversion Rate

Why was there no clear winner?

Two reason’s why I think no winner was found. The first is an issue on our end, we displayed the test for everyone, internal and external computers. Typically on campus staff/faculty have wayne.edu set as their homepage, they know the site and what they need to get to. Regardless what the link is called they will click it, this throws off the results since they are not our primary audience and they are not actually thinking about the click they are making.

The second is that someone looking for our list of programs has really only one route to get to it from wayne.edu and that is this link. It might take someone longer to figure out “Schools & Colleges” will give them a list of our programs but they still got there. They are adapting to our wording instead of ignoring our wording and using another method to find the information they need. I even wonder if we changed it to “What we offer” we would still get people clicking on it because they have a specific task in mind already.

We ended up just keeping Schools & Colleges for now

The thought is since there was no real winner although we love academic programs better we cannot justify the change. The university community has been voicestrous about any changes to wayne.edu and we want to make sure we have some real numbers to backup a navigation change.

Frankly the homepage navigation is not where we want it to be at all. It’s these types of tests that get us in the right direction on purpose instead of on a whim.

We are going to run another test on an unknown date for an unknown time with the lessons we learned from this test. Sorry we can’t tell you more but I am sure we will write about it afterward.

Do you know WSUP? Find out Fall 2009. Enjoy these links of the week.

• Check My Colours – Analyse the color contrast of web pages
• Designing for Sign Up (video & slides)
• Sending an XML document object to PHP with jQuery
• “Good enough” instead of “absolutely perfect”
• 40 Stunning Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows Wallpapers | Web Design Ledger
• Styling buttons as links allowing you to POST away
• CSS Redundancy Checker
• Play Your Cards Right: Run Your First Card Sort
• jQuery Infinite Carousel | jQuery for Designers – Tutorials and screencasts
• Apple – QuickTime – Apple WWDC Keynote Address
• Know Your Core: Providing Focus for Web Applications
• Six Lessons Business Bloggers Can Learn From Great Public Speakers
• No-Fuss Video Conferencing Using Tinychat

Have you ever had to put multiple events in the calendar at events.wayne.edu that were so similar you wished there was a way to just copy your event instead of re-entering all that data? We’ve been working on an event copy feature and now it’s available for you to use.

Want to copy an event?

When you have a new event that closely resembles a previous event you can now use your previous event as a template for your new event. You’ll have to know where to look for the copy event link though. We decided to tuck the event management links away to clean up the page and make it a little easier to scan for your event. Mousing over the event with reveal the Copy Event link as well as any other event management links available on your event.

Need to copy your RSVP too?

Event copying doesn’t stop at the event. If your event has an attached RSVP you can also choose to copy the RSVP along with your event. At the bottom of the copy event screen you’ll see a few extra fields (this will only display if your event has an attached RSVP). The only catch is that the short name has to be unique, so you’ll need to come up with a new short name for this rendition of your RSVP. If selected the entire RSVP will be copied and attached to your new event.