This morning the proto-SM@LL team held, appropriately enough, a paper prototyping meeting. The purpose of today was to sit down and work through the priorities for our project’s user interface. Through doing it on paper we’ve kept the aspirational design process away from issues such as “But the system won’t let us do that”. The idea being that what we end up with on paper is our ideal prototype system.
Naturally, since user evaluation and usability plays a strong thread in our proposed project what the final project-end product may look like may well be considerably different to this initial model. But we have to start somewhere, and that was what this morning was about.
We looked at a variety of other exemplar sites that for one reason of another have caught our eye. We discussed priorities in terms of on screen elements, and we worked through a few simple user case approaches. What we have on paper now is a little rudimentary, and a future sprint meeting will start to work through the actual components of these design elements (along with discussions here on the blog). Hopefully allowing us to move to functional prototype very rapidly one our funding is approved.
Some off the top of my head thoughts:
- at subject level could we have a word cloud of the main reserch interests of the department? – linking to an RSS feed from relevant database? OK probably the words are too long! – that could retain some of the interest – its less of a ‘library’ page. seeing departmental research interests respresented visually in that way could be an attention grabber?
- Could we include some kind of section / link to ‘how to set up your own RSS feed’ somewhere – if we are using alot of feeds perhaps users would want to set up their own.
- if we are focussed on researchers, perhaps we should cut straight to the specialised interest and have a completely minimal 1st page; word cloud and search box or even just word cloud.
Could we consider ways of doing this that are not the same as existing ones? If we are looking at existing ones we keep getting drawn to repeating the same things…
Comment by sarahw9 — May 6, 2009 @ 1:22 pm
“at subject level could we have a word cloud of the main reserch interests of the department?”
I like this idea, assuming we are talking subpages.
“Could we include some kind of section / link to ‘how to set up your own RSS feed’ somewhere – if we are using a lot of feeds perhaps users would want to set up their own.”
Brief link on a subpage somewhere maybe, this isn’t a teaching site.
“if we are focussed on researchers, perhaps we should cut straight to the specialised interest and have a completely minimal 1st page; word cloud and search box or even just word cloud.”
I’d like it to be quite minimal,but we need to have enough value on the front page to draw people in.
Comment by ajcann — May 7, 2009 @ 4:17 pm
We could take the research areas easily enough from the collection profiles/dept webpages so that sounds easy enough. In the time scale of the project we wouldn’t need to update them – but for long term sustainability (which will have to be an output criteria) we’ll need to think about what this means for site maintainence.
I quite like the idea of a “How to” section – Alan’s right that the primary goal of the site is to facilitate access to research relevant sources of information. But at the same time, if we have any time/resource this is an idea that might be worth including somewhere. Just not as a priority. It might form part of any interview schemea when talking 1-2-1 with academics.
Minimal (google) would be good – but that’s just a search box. We could go that route, but everytime we have to create more on the lower levels we’re increasing the amount of work in creation, customisation, refinement and maintainance. And we certainly need enough screen realestate to draw people in on page zero too.
But all good points!
Comment by gazjjohnson — May 11, 2009 @ 9:31 am