This week was all about getting things done and planning for the future, doing less but being more focused. The new Events Calendar is coming along nicely, look for a post early next week about it. In the mean time check out these links of the week, most have to do with user experience and [...]

The 5th World Usability Day and the 7th Annual Usability and Accessibility Conference at Michigan State University, will be held on Thursday, November 12, 2009, at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center on the MSU campus.
Designing for a Sustainable World
Designing for a Sustainable World focuses on how our products and services impact our world. The [...]

All Web site requests come in through our wcs[at]wayne.edu email account. Recently we’ve been testing a ticket system called Tender to keep track of all these emails. It has worked well but still has not solved the true issue we are facing so we are not going to continue using it.
The issue comes down to [...]

Turn your everyday photos into something that looks like it was taken by a semi-pro. This four-step tutorial is fun because it doesn’t require hard work and the final outcome never disappoint! Lets start!
STEP 1
Once you’ve picked your photo, Duplicate the layer.

STEP 2
With the duplicated layer selected, go to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. This [...]

This has been a week of conferences, the jQuery conference then the Ajax Experience that our very own Nick West and Chris Pelzer were at. Quite a bit has been going on around these conferences and the links below show it. Enjoy the links this week.

Things to ask before you redo your website
YUI 2.8.0: Storage [...]

We are currently in the process of redesigning and adding more functionality to the University wide calendar (more on this later).  We decided to run some statistics to see what people have used and to get a better understanding of our users.  Here are some interesting statistics we came across.
Statistics
136 separate calendars
30,804 total events among [...]

The theme this week was all about research, primarily web research. We dove deep into not only our site analytics but also how users used our sites and even some real time user data. We learned a lot and modified the road map for wayne.edu based on a few key trends that kept coming up. [...]

The University Pharmacy is a tenant of The Towers Residential Suites. They are a full pharmacy and open to the public. They came to us because their web presence was lacking, it was hard to find what they offered, promotions and basic information.
We took the needs of the pharmacy and its users and designed the [...]

Now that classes are in full steam the new Welcome Back Week Web site is up. Unfortunately I don’t have a screen shot of last year’s site with events or navigation but the main change is the design of the site.
The new site has the week spelled out prominently and large buttons to select each [...]

So this was an eventful week, something new every day.

Monday-Tuesday was a power outage at the main C&IT data center
Wednesday the Board of Governors meeting where the budget was approved
Thursday the high traffic due to the first day of classes took down Blackboard
Friday came with a water main break at Warren and Cass which stopped [...]