Report from Rochester: Day Three

Today was the first full day of HighEdWebDev 2007. Conference goers had the chance to attend up to eight presentations in five tracks. I spent most of my time in the “Usability Accessibility and Design” track with a brief visit to “Technical Propeller Hats Required” and “Marketing, Management and Professional Development” (a mismatched track for this particular presentation, which was on Social Media). What follows are write-ups from those that’ll come home with me in some form or fashion.

The Read/Write Web

Today began with a keynote talk from Apple, Inc.’s George Cook. George is a National Consulting Engineer for the K-20 customers in Apple’s Edu Division. His talk was a mix of showcasing Apple offerings alongside some pretty basic information about rich media and social interactivity on the web these days.

George divided content on a site into four web trends and four corresponding outcomes. Websites these days foster sharing, offer rich media, are interactive and produce live content (pretty basic stuff). What this means for the user is that they are social (sharing), they have context (rich media), they’re engaging (interactivity) and they keep you connected (live content). Again, these connections aren’t hard to make.

However, there’s a nice takeaway here that you can leverage for some eye candy and possible case-making. If you assign a number (one through ten) to the site’s trendiness (sharing, media, interactivity, live) and do the same for the personal outcome (There’s user stuff here, I like.), you can get a nice graph that will show gestalt in certain areas, sometimes. That difference (you’re wanting a higher score for personal outcome than trendiness, obviously) can indicate a successful and useful site.

There’s a lot of room for bias here, but it could be a nice metric and I plan to try it out.

These Kids Today

Lori Packer, a Web Editor for University of Rochester, gave a nice overview of usability (in the context of observance of the user trying to use something, anything) and then spent the majority of her presentation talking about things she learned when studying parents and brand new freshman as they tried to navigate U of R’s websites to find information.

Lori and I have a similar approach to usability and I found myself nodding my head a lot during her talk. She’s got the right ideas and it was nice to see a higher ed execution of that. The two things that I’ll definitely take home with me are as follows:

1. Lori had a very consistent (she might call this a “duh” moment) observation with what she phrased “Yada Yada Yada” text on websites. She said that both parents and students recognize it and skip it. Her focus on this made me realize, for the first time, that this fluffy content can impede the usability of my websites. It’s not only something that’s ineffectual in and of itself, it’s perhaps detrimental to the user experience as a whole. This was an very important lesson to learn for me.
2. Lori also described her method for snagging users and I thought it was a great one. She attends tabling events (like orientation week or alumni week) and asks people to schedule some time while they’ll be on campus to stop by to test the site. She also offers a free gift. This was a “duh” moment for me. I haven’t ever even thought of that. Another nice place to find prospectives: the admissions tour. Good stuff.

Universal Design, the Web and You

Daniel Frommelt from the University of Wisconsin – Platteville was one of my “takeaways” from last year’s conference. In fact, his presentation was the inspiration for how I do (and now preach about) web-surveys. So when I heard he was presenting again this year, I made it a point to attend.

His presentation touched on a lot of material, from definitions of UD to the inception of the web to demos of products that are likely to innovate the way people with disabilities interact and thrive in the world. It was eye-opening to read text as if I had a disability and to watch a video of a boy with Spinal Muscular Atrophy use a host of assistive devices to browse the web. We watched demos of products like Photosynth and Microsoft’s Surface, neither of which I’d seen before and both of which were absolutely revolutionary (especially the former).

His talk was educational and inspirational and a good intro into some things we should be considering when designing anything from door handles to social web interactions. As my interests veer in and out of non-screen-based information spaces, this is a particularly interesting focus to consider.

Time for more networking.

As the day wraps up, we’ll be going out for more “nightly networking” and vendor-hosted parties on various high floors of the Hyatt. I’m glad to hear the rumor that there were no parties this year was only such. However, that won’t stop me from more conference griping, I mean feedback: Instead of two parties on the same night, how about one on each? And pastries for breakfast is so not cool. Let’s get some protein up in that ball room!