stub for RFP

February 13, 2009

Middlebury College Request for Proposals
to Redesign and Restructure its Web Presence

Contents

1. About Middlebury

2. About Middlebury’s Current Web Site

3. Our Audiences

4. About the Project

5. Project Scope

6. Deliverables

7. Proposal Requirements

8. Proposal Timetable

9. Contact Info

10. Appendix: Requirements; Links

NOTE: A conference call/Web presentation is scheduled for Friday, February 20, from 1-3 p.m. EDT. All vendors are invited to participate and ask questions about the RFP during this time. Kindly submit advance questions by close of business on Friday, February 20.

Conference call /webinar information and registration at:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/599076523

You may also see a web version of this RFP where you may ask questions and see answers to others’ questions at https://sites.middlebury.edu/webredostories/?p=51

QUESTIONS? Contact Tim Etchells, 802.443.5707, tetchell@middlebury.edu

The project blog, with all relevant documents and background, is at

http://go.middlebury.edu/webmakeover/

1. About Middlebury

Established in 1800, Middlebury College, located in Vermont’s scenic Champlain Valley, has long been one of the country’s top liberal arts colleges. Today, Middlebury offers its 2,350 undergraduate students and its approximately 500 graduate students a broad curriculum embracing the arts, humanities, literature, foreign languages, social sciences, and natural sciences, with special strengths in international studies and environmental studies.

In addition to its residential undergraduate college, Middlebury:

  • offers intensive language training each summer, in 10 languages, to more than 1,300 students through its Language Schools at two locations;

  • is home to the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference every summer at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf Mountain Campus in Ripton and three other locations;

  • maintains Schools Abroad sites in a dozen countries and more than 30 cities;

  • is affiliated with the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), a California graduate school offering masters degrees in international policy and management, translation and Interpretation, and language education to more than 700 students.

To understand the institutional context in which this project takes place, we suggest that you read:

  1. Middlebury’s mission statement at http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/catalogs/catalog/about_midd/mission.htm

  2. Monterey’s mission & history statement

  3. Middlebury’s strategic plan “Knowledge Without Boundaries” at http://www.middlebury.edu/administration/planning

  4. Monterey’s strategic plan.

  5. Middlebury’s current capital campaign, designed to support our strategic plan, at www.middleburyinitiative.org

2. About Middlebury’s Current Web Site

The current www.middlebury.edu site runs on Microsoft Content Management Server. All content from the previous site was moved into the current Content Management System by Library & Information Services (LIS) and Communications staffers in 2004. What was then a 15,000 page site now totals about 50,000 pages of content. The site covers every academic department and college office, every athletic team, every museum gallery and performance space, all of the Residential Commons activities, etc. The content ranges from a home page with recent news items to the deepest recesses of departmental archives that in many cases pre-date the 2004 makeover.

Close to five years later, our Web site still “works,” meaning that it functions well enough that most people can (eventually) find what they’re looking for. But it is badly in need of a reorganization and a face-lift. Over the past few years, it’s also become increasingly clear that our “distributed editing” model is not working. More than 300 content providers, many inadequately trained, some touching their pages only once a year, and working with a relatively user-unfriendly CMS, have tried to keep the Web site up to date, with limited success. And even as the site aged, and grew, it became obvious that it was not keeping up with the latest advances in Web technology (Web 2.0 tools), in terms of dynamic content and interactivity. To overcome the limits of our current site, numerous offices and individuals have used systems external to the CMS such as WordPress and MediaWiki, creating auxiliaries to our core Web site, often with lack of integration of content and design. We need a new strategy.

With the expected mothballing of MCMS by Microsoft, this is the right time to make significant changes, in hopes of streamlining the public-facing site, and offering visitors and the College community access to the latest Web tools for maintaining and enhancing their own web engagement.

Our internal audience is 100 percent broadband connection with a screen resolution of 1024×768 or higher and only 3 percent of our external visitors are on dialup with 95 percent of them viewing our site at 1024×768 or higher. Internally, 62 percent of us use Internet Explorer with 26 percent favoring Firefox and 12 percent using Safari. Externally, 60 percent of our visitors use Internet Explorer, 26 percent Firefox and 14 percent Safari. Our current site is designed for Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 2+ and other browsers including Chrome and Opera. We do anticipate an increased use of hand-held devices (e.g. iPhone, Blackberry, Android).

3. Our Web Site Audiences
& What (We Think) They’re Looking For

Each of the schools (the undergraduate college, MIIS, Bread Loaf School of English, and the Language Schools) has a diverse audience. Each of the user categories below therefore represents a different demographic for each school. For example, prospective students are high school students for the undergraduate college, teachers for Bread Loaf, working professionals for MIIS, a mix of undergraduate and graduate students for Language Schools and Schools Abroad, and a significant number of international students for all schools. Some of these constituents use the site casually and infrequently; others use it daily if not hourly. They are (in alphabetical order):

  • Alumni: What’s new at the College; how my team/club/group is doing; why it’s still the place they love and remember, even as it changes dramatically to keep up with the times; ways to keep in touch with other alums, and with faculty and staff they remember

  • Current students: What’s new at the College; information on campus activities; info on dining, housing and social life issues; easy access to course and research materials; and ways to connect with faculty, staff, alumni, and each other

  • Donors: Ways to learn what’s new at the College; quick and easy gateways to make gifts; ways to target their gifts to programs they feel strongly about

  • Faculty: What’s new at the College; access to research materials; tools to promote research and facilitate collaboration; tools to facilitate class activities; ability to help student advisees navigate requirements, find educational and career resources; access information necessary to being an employee (HR, benefits, relevant forms)

  • Parents of current students: Information on what their students are up to (academics, athletics, extracurricular activities); what’s new at the College; key information to assist them (as in financial aid, calendars, etc.), and ways to connect with other parents

  • Prospective students & their families: Far and away our most important external audience, they want: current information on Middlebury and its programs; in particular, a sense of what it’s like to be a Middlebury student, where they might fit in on campus, and what life after Middlebury might look like

  • Staff: What’s new at the College; how to keep in touch with one another and with students and alumni; how to use College Web tools to make their working lives less stressful and more efficient; access information necessary to being an employee (HR, benefits, relevant forms)

  • Other friends of the College, including local community: What’s new at the College; events listings

4. About the Project

Middlebury seeks a partner to help us redesign and restructure the current Web presence of the undergraduate college at Middlebury [ www.middlebury.edu ] and the site of our affiliate, the Monterey Institute of International Studies [ www.miis.edu ], as well as the Summer Language Schools, the Schools Abroad, the Bread Loaf School of English, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which are part of the middlebury.edu domain.

This will be the next step in a process under way since September of 2008, when a Web makeover team appointed by the president began meeting with stakeholders on and off campus, surveying different constituencies (faculty, staff, students, alumni, prospective students), organizing focus groups, and generally gathering information on the strengths and weaknesses of the current site, and developing ideas about what we need to do to meet the needs of a Middlebury community that is increasingly reliant on access to Web-based content and tools.

Based on this work, the new Middlebury Web presence will include:

  • public-facing sites for both Middlebury and Monterey that are designed primarily for prospective students (and their families), alumni, donors, and the local community. Among the key areas of these sites will be admissions, financial aid, academics, athletics, the arts, and giving, as well as home pages and sub-sites for departments and offices.

  • internally-focused published sites that allow our various offices and departments to deliver information and services to students, faculty and staff.

  • personal, customizable pages created by faculty, staff, students and visitors, modeled on iGoogle, that will provide widget-based, customizable dashboards for our users to collect, organize, and share information relevant and useful to them. These are non-public homepages used by members of the community to personalize their web experiences.

The major goals are to:

  • streamline the public-facing sites, so that people can find exactly what they need, without tripping over all the things they don’t.

  • make it easier for prospective students and their families to discover and engage with Middlebury and its affiliated programs at a much-improved admissions site, using the latest Web tools and engaging, dynamic and interactive content.

  • provide up-to-date Web tools that any individual member of our audiences can use to create and personalize their Middlebury/Monterey Web experience with a “customized home page.”

  • promote and facilitate communication between and among our target audiences, and in particular promote increased engagement by alumni in the life of the College.

  • improve, standardize and update public-facing sites belonging to offices and departments, while at the same time giving students, faculty and staff access to flexible templates and dynamic content with which to tell their stories and do their work.

The primary objectives for the vendor’s involvement in this project are:

  • a comprehensive design blueprint and strategy for the public-facing sites for Middlebury, the Language Schools, the Bread Loaf programs, and Monterey.

  • a thorough review of the proposed “information architecture” for those sites and for the internally-focused site (see http://sites.middlebury.edu/webredo/2009/02/11/proposed-information-architecture/ for the the proposed IA).

  • design and process flows for the content and tools, some existing and some new, that will comprise our overall web presence.

Role of vendor in project: We have significant staffing and expertise to implement a new information architecture, build and program functionality, and convert our current Web presence. We are looking for a vendor to:

  • build overall blueprints for our Web presence,

  • create designs, and

  • devise strategies in collaboration with us to synthesize the various parts of our Web presence into a relatively seamless whole.

We expect that the public-facing Middlebury and MIIS sites will be relatively small and maintained by a core group of professional communicators and Web producers. We expect that Middlebury’s Library & Information Services staff, with help from the Communications office, will be building out the new design and information architecture of this site with Drupal, and using other tools as necessary, including ASP.net for the customized home pages. We will incorporate existing open source Drupal modules where possible, but also write our own code to interface with existing systems.

The design and structure must make it easy to access and serve up video, audio, Flash and other dynamic Web content.

This design project will specifically include creating as-seamless-as-possible interfaces with several vendor-produced and hosted Web sites, including the College Store and the alumni online community. In addition, we want to facilitate connections through the Middlebury site via widgets and “share” buttons with various networking Web sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and iTunes University.

Specifically, the new site will interface with these existing systems:

  • A database of contact information run on Microsoft Active Directory

  • A calendar of events run on CollegeNet’s Resource25 using R25 Web Services

  • Feeds of content from an on-campus instance of WordPress

  • Feeds of content from an on-campus instance of MediaWiki

  • Streaming video from an on-campus instance of Flash Media Server using a custom developed Web service that can both upload and retrieve videos and audio

  • A Campus Map application using KML as a data source and interfacing with Google Maps

  • A Web service to deliver weather information from NOAA

  • College Store site running on an MBS system

  • Feeds of data from our Enterprise Resource Management system (Sungard Banner)

  • Exchange/webmail or other future e-mail delivery systems

In general, all information from external sources will be delivered to the public-facing Web site via XML Web services or RSS feeds for the front-end Web site. In addition, for personalized home pages and sites used primarily for in-house use by employees and students, interfaces may additionally include simple links to other Web sites and services, iCal, and SQL database queries.

5. Project Scope

The scope of the project includes the entire Web presence of the College, MIIS, and affiliated programs, except the following:

  • the College’s academic course management system, Segue, as well as other learning management systems currently running on various campuses, such as Moodle.

  • the College’s administrative/enterprise resource system (Banner), which serves Middlebury and Monterey students, faculty, and staff, though the design/structure of the site will need to accommodate feeds to the various Web sites from Banner.

  • the hosted online community called PantherNet (Harris) and Monterey’s iModules system, which serve alumni and students, though new designs will be applied to such services.

  • BreadNet, the Bread Loaf School of English internal conferencing system (currently deployed via FirstClass).

6. Deliverables

  • Information architecture review and finalization: The vendor shall work with an IA that we have developed, expand upon this work, and develop a tested IA as the foundation of the project.

  • Process flows for all transactional components, including end-users’ and content managers’ uses of the Web presence.

  • Wireframes, after completion of IA work.

  • Design concepts and elements.

  • After concepts are approved, treatments and design templates for a select number of differing page types, which could include the following:

    • Middlebury and Monterey home pages

    • Top level landing page (for example, Admissions)

    • Generic content page

    • Gateway or sitemap page (for example, Faculty & Staff)

    • Recent news headlines

    • News article

    • Profile page for community members (e.g. faculty, staff, or student)

    • Events listing

    • Frequently Asked Questions page

    • Wrapper with core design elements for integrating external systems into web site

    • Variations on these treatments to offer options to departments based on desired look, function, and usability

  • A design treatment and process diagram for the customizable personal home page.

  • Treatments and templates deliverables should be in file format to be agreed upon.

  • Style guides designed for ease of use by content creators and editors.

  • Provisions for W3C specification compliance and Section 508 ADA compliance.

  • Usability testing plan: from both visual branding and user experience points of view; note that usability review of site flow and structure should take place before design work.

  • Tentative schedule and plan of work to complete Monterey’s site for public launch in August 2009, and all Middlebury and MIIS sites by December 2009.

7. Proposal Requirements

Proposals should include the following information:

  • A descriptive outline of the methodology and processes that would be used on this project, including input required by Middlebury, how your firm handles project communications, and what tools you use.

  • Proposed timetable for two launches: MIIS in August 2009, and the rest by December 2009.

  • List of vendor’s project team members, including professional biographies.

  • Price break down by phase, with a specific list of vendor activities and deliverables. Include hourly rates for project team members. Also include built-in contingency work as required during implementation, and break out travel, lodging, and communication costs.

  • Links to examples of similar work, including examples of delivered and commented html and style sheets.

  • A list of assumptions made in developing your proposal.

  • References.

8. Proposal Timetable

Here is our schedule for evaluating proposals. If you intend to submit a proposal, please understand that it must be submitted by Friday, February 27, 2009, at 5 p.m. EST for full consideration.

Request for proposals issued: Friday, February 13, 2009

Conference call to clarify RFP and answer questions: Friday, February 20, 2009,

from 1-3 p.m. EST.

Proposals due: Friday, February 27, 2009,

5 p.m. EST

Finalists notified by: Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Vendor presentations completed by: Thursday, March 19, 2009

Vendors notified of final selection by: Monday, March 23, 2009

9. Contact Info

Proposals should be submitted electronically to:

Tim Etchells, director, interactive communications

tetchell@middlebury.edu

Contact info: e-mail, tetchell@middlebury.edu; phone, 802.443.5707; fax, 802.443.2071

10. Appendix: Requirements

As part of our work this fall, we conducted a series of focus groups and surveys, and commissioned ‘stakeholder reports’ from key campus offices. We have synthesized the results of this work into a raw requirements database that can be found at http://tinyurl.com/middwebdetails. Below you will find a summary of these requirements that convey the focus, scope, and direction of our project. This should not be taken as an exhaustive or complete description of the requirements, but is intended to provide a sense of the directions and ambitions. It is worth noting again that we intend to do the software development and integration for this, and are looking for help on the blueprints, IA, process modeling, design, and usability testing.

This section is organized into the following sections:

  1. General Design Concepts

  2. Information Architecture / Site Index / Navigation

  3. Customization and personalization

  4. Interfaces to Systems and Platforms

  5. Search

  6. Analytics, Content & Site Management, Authorizations & Permissions

10.1 General Design Concepts

  • Home page reflects Middlebury as the global liberal arts college (“One Midd”)

  • Give a strong sense of the place and people.

  • Engaging, interactive, dynamic content: site should be “cool”

  • Convey what it is really like to be a student.

  • Design easy to translate/function as text-only

  • Cross-platform and browser viewing with minimum of necessary plug-ins

  • Mobile Device Design/Support with pages that load quickly and are deliverable to Web-capable mobile phones & PDAs; feed information (e.g. sports scores updates, e-commerce info) to mobile devices

  • Middlebury-at-a-glance quick facts and info clearly accessed, dynamically updated

  • Easy to use, engaging admissions site that encourages prospective students to create a profile and personalize their experience

  • “Stories” that profile individual students, faculty, staff, alums to humanize the Middlebury/MIIS experiences and highlight the opportunities that await new students.

  • Improved academic department sites with more design flexibility via multiple templates, strong multimedia capabilities, embedded feeds of relevant events & information, and robust interlinking with other academic elements (course schedule, course websites)

  • Improved “Contact Us” placement & feature on sub-sites (contact us may be departmental contact, in addition to web content provider/maintainer)

  • Some flexibility in use of fonts, colors templates

  • Menu of widgets (described below) that can be embedded within a sub-site (e.g. faculty info, course info, calendars, etc.)

  • W3C specifications for standards

10.2 Information Architecture, Site Index, & Navigation

Site indexes, gateways

  • Design must include robust site index(es), including alphabetical listing of “official” Web sites

  • Gateways: indexes of sites for particular constituencies (students, alumni, faculty, etc.) See www.brynmawr.edu for example of targeted banners.

Improved navigation

Ideas that we have collected as part of our initial requirements gathering process include:

  • Clear direction to information about undergraduate college from the Middlebury home page

  • Ability to direct visitors to other programs (MIIS, Schools Abroad, Bread Loaf, etc.) without leaving front page, but not cluttered or confusing navigation

  • Minimal number of “layers” to navigate to reach destination page

  • Context aware navigation elements: personalized headers (e.g. menu options vary depending on constituency / sign-on); example: Header navigation shows links to Financial Aid services if you’re on financial aid, or to HR if you’re a staff member

10.3. Customization and Personalization

For both our external audiences (prospective students, visitors, etc.) and our internal audiences, we envision an environment that will allow users of the site to customize and personalize their home pages and their experiences of the site, similar to iGoogle. Potential content could include bookmarked pages, event feeds, weather, course schedules, targeted news and event items, facility hours, widgets from external websites, etc. Your proposal should speak to how you would help us flesh out these ideas in terms of information architecture, process flow diagrams, design, and advice about implementation (including technology advice).

10.4. Interfaces to Systems and Platforms

Design must accommodate interactive and multimedia features and applications that are already being used at Middlebury, as well as integration of external systems and future innovations. We do not expect a vendor to integrate these systems, but to propose a design and create templates that will integrate these materials in as seamless a manner as possible. What follows is a list of materials that a design must accomodate.

A. Multimedia (audio / visual / podcast ) interfaces for internally-created content such as:

  • Link to and embedding of Middlebury iTunesU site

  • Audio / video interviews

  • Interface for admissions video presentations

  • Videos for training (employees, student staff, etc.)

  • Virtual campus tours / exhibits

  • Embeddable audio/video of lectures, student performances & creative work, and campus PR, ideally requiring no separate or unusual plug-ins, or navigation to sub-sites or external apps, with full cross-browser/platform support

  • Currently running Flash media server (middmedia.middlebury.edu)

B. In-browser live chat/Q&A

  • Live chats with students and admissions officers, and potentially with other offices within the College; we are currently using Meebo and would happily continue if fully integrated into new site

C. Social software/Web 2.0 integration
We have a wide array of Web 2.0 applications and activities that are not presently meaningfully intergrated into our existing site. The new design needs to accommodate the following activities:

  • Allow people to share pages on social network of choice (e.g. del.icio.us, Facebook, etc.)

  • Commentable pages (as an option)

  • Integration of blogging and wiki technologies into range of different sites and sub-sites via RSS

  • Ability to coordinate with and embed external multimedia networks, like YouTube, Flickr, etc.

  • Links to allow users subscribe to RSS feeds through site

  • Tagging system to span multiple content sources in order to aggregate and view similar content / data

  • Bookmarking of individual pages for inclusion in customized homepages

D. Calendars and Events
We have an existing master calendar application that we wish to enhance to feed calendar information throughout the site. Here are thoughts about how this might manifest itself on the new site:

Provide utility for creating departmental / personal Web-based calendars and display of hours open/closed
Examples: bookstore, library branches, swimming pool, fitness center, dining halls

Enhanced master calendar functionality

– Sort Calendars by Interest, Topic, Date, etc. (Filters)

– Event Feeds (via RSS, iCal, email, email digest) to targeted users or to users who select certain event categories

– Allow users to RSVP to Event

– Enhance room reservations system

Examples: allow any user to make reservation and others to approve for all campus spaces; one-click mechanism to have event appear in Events Calendar

– User-uploaded photos for events; thumbnails display with events calendar and are clickable for event details

Box-Office integration with calendaring: from calendar, one-click to ticket purchase

External events calendaring

Examples: Enable a separate calendar that allows for marketing of off site events (such as those planned by College Advancement, Admissions, etc.). Make those events also accessible as feeds to the off-campus users.

E. Course Information

All course information is presently stored within Banner, our main administrative application. We will extract this information to provide course information throughout the site. We will want to use this information in faculty profiles, a course catalog application, and within department listings.

F. Faculty/Student Information

We want to integrate existing data stored in Banner along with new applications for storing additional information to provide for the ability to produce:

  • Dynamic faculty home pages (office hours, courses being taught, publications, C.V.)

  • Central database of faculty C.V., updated publications, & accomplishments

  • Faculty office hours

  • Database/portfolios of student research, work, volunteer activities, accomplishments

G. Maps, Campus Tours

We have a set of already existing maps that we wish to enhance and make available throughout the site. The new site will need to accommodate inclusion of the following geographic information resources that we have already developed or plan to develop internally:

  • Interactive world map showing location of all College programs as a visual representation of the global liberal arts college; indicate presence of study abroad, language schools; where people are from.

  • Virtual campus tour

  • Interactive campus map with directions to campus, including parking information

  • Dynamic listing of room/location features

H. Forms
In our discussions with the campus about what they would like to see in a new Web site, a major component that many offices wanted was the ability to easily collect information via Web forms, and (sometimes) to be able to manage that data via the Web

We will build and/or provide our authors the ability to build customizable forms for collecting data that allow things such as:

  • A general tool for allowing people to sign up for things (appointments, office hours, tutorials, music lessons, etc.)

  • Forms for allowing on-line donations that are easy to customize

  • Forms for event registration

  • Easy way to allow for storefronts/ecommerce

  • Grant proposal submissions

  • Simple feedback forms that deliver results in e-mail and .csv files

I. Media Galleries

  • Ability for departments, student groups and others to aggregate, annotate, and share media (audio, video, photos) within their design framework, including both internally and externally hosted media.

J. Newsletter Production and Distribution via Web
To serve both internal and external audiences, many departments produce newsletters that go out as print, email and RSS; we would like to provide a utility that makes it easy (for those willing to commit the time to writing, editing, and marketing) to produce an attractive newsletter.

10.5. Search

Search
We provide search through the google search appliance. We will want to integrate search throughout the site, and develop strategies for improving the accuracy of search results given the contraints of the chosen technology.

Our users have asked for:

  • Improved Search functionality

  • Scoped Search

  • Integrated search box in persistent banner (instead of link to search page)

10.6. Analytics, Content & Site Management, Authorizations & Permissions

Analytics

In the administrative environment that we provide for site administrators, we want to allow them access to tracking and analytics tool that will show web use statistics.

Content Management and Administrative Interfaces

With Drupal, we will need to think about how we design and deploy editing capabilities throughout the community. Here is a list of requirements for the editing environment. Since we have some control over how the editing environment manifests itself for our editors, this list may prove useful in designing the process workflows for the editors of our site.

  • Cross Browser Compatibility

  • Unified (common) editing interface across all content platforms (CMS, Blogs, wikis)

  • Must include foreign language character compatibility (Cyrillic, Kanji, etc.)

  • Editing site content needs to be easier and flexible: “as easy as commenting on a blog”

  • Provide for remote-access (off-campus) editing

  • A non-public test / development space for CMS pages

  • Improve granting of CMS authorizations

  • Provide for collaborative (multiple author) document creation/editing

  • Make it easy to incorporate images, audio, video and multimedia on site

Document and Page display and archiving

These features need to be visible within the design; LIS will address the technology to implement this.

  • Print functionality with proper formatting across browsers

  • Document emailing

  • Provide for archiving of key Web site content, documents

  • Provide for tagging and easy access to archived materials, including video archives

Authorization / Permissions
While the technical implementation of these features will fall to the staff of LIS, we anticipate the following controls that will need to be visible through the editing interface, and will require process diagrams and design work, informed by the constraints of Drupal.

  • Include social networks when possible with SSO

  • Provide for Guest Accounts

  • Integrate with LDAP/AD

  • Develop college-wide standard RSS profiles for user-types (students, faculty, staff)

  • Allow for Password/Authentication protected areas, including restricted / private blogs & wikis that uses AD groups and ad hoc groups.

  • Authorized users for content management; provide for temporary student employee permissions to edit content

  • Allow permissions to scale to the document level

Links

The following links may be helpful to find out more about the work done by the project team leading up to this moment.

main web makeover project Web site

http://go.middlebury.edu/webmakeover/

internet strategy taskforce report

https://sites.middlebury.edu/webredostories/?p=8

stakeholder reports

https://sites.middlebury.edu/webredostories/

requirements

http://tinyurl.com/middwebdetails

preliminary IA

http://sites.middlebury.edu/webredo/2009/02/11/proposed-information-architecture/

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Communications

Liaison: Maggie Paine

Stakeholders interviewed: Discussions with communications at staff meetings and with Tim Etchells; written feedback solicited; two focus groups with communicators (Mike McKenna, Stephen Diehl, Diane Foley, Katie Scott (E.S.), Mark Zelis, Regan Eberhardt, Robert Keren, Pam Fogg, Matt Jennings, Liza Sacheli Lloyd (CFA), Kelsey Eichhorn).

Overview

The communications department focused on development and delivery of content, use of content and design to both demonstrate what a top liberal arts college is all about and to differentiate Middlebury from its peers, access to information, and ways to share of information within work groups and across campus.

A key goal of the web site is to strengthen Middlebury’s identity as the global liberal arts college and to reflect the College’s brand mantra-Knowledge Without Boundaries. The site should demonstrate to visitors who/what Middlebury is, how it’s different, and why it’s relevant to their lives and to the world.

In addition, many of the requirements described by Admissions, College Advancement, and Project on Creativity apply to communications.

Development/Delivery of Content

  • Home page that conveys the full scope of Middlebury (One Midd), including LS, BLSE, BLWC, Schools Abroad, MIIS, MMLA, but that clearly highlights the undergraduate college and makes it easy to get to undergraduate admissions information.
    • Suggestion for how to reinforce this sense of the global liberal arts college: Use an interactive map/globe showing all parts of the College (including all sites abroad). Let people choose a location to visit and either “fly” them in using Google Earth or let them click on a map location, then provide content about that location (snapshot information, video, links for more exploring). Links would take you into specific areas of the site, where visitors could explore their particular interests.
    • Link this map to the College’s online map, but have information about each building in a pop-up screen with brief description of building, photo, and links to other content. For example, for Ross Dining Hall, could have photo of the hall, menu for the day, video tour, link to story on Dolci or food review and other dining-related topics.
  • Use content and design to showcase core strengths
  • Site should be “cool,” up to date, convey sense that Middlebury is current.
    • Site should be engaging and interactive with stories, photos, videos, slideshows, blogs, fun features.
      • “Eye candy:” animation, photos, graphics were cited in prospective student focus group as key. However, these should be easy to bypass, so we don’t irritate visitors to the site.
      • Must reflect the beauty of the campus, sense of place, the intellectual excitement of classes and research, and convey what it would be like to be a student and that this is a welcoming and diverse campus community, etc. Student life is key (dorms, dining halls, people, activities, town of Middlebury, not isolated)
      • Content should convey advantages of top liberal arts schools and differentiate Middlebury from peer schools
      • Animation, videos, etc. should be easily bypassable and not prevent users from getting to information quickly
  • Engage students with fresh content on a regular basis.
    • Make it easy to pull stories, videos, slideshows, lectures, and photos developed for one purpose (such as admissions or advancement) into multiple other areas of the Web site, without having to re-enter it in the cms.
    • Make it easy to keep content up to date by automatically pulling information from Banner and databases wherever possible (such as course listings and schedules on faculty pages)
    • Ensure we have student-, alumni-, and faculty-generated content on the site. Enable them to submit/post stories, videos, photos etc. (perhaps even post a photo on the Middlebury site at the same time as they are posting on facebook or YouTube).
    • Online “live” chat with students and admissions officers
    • Videos
      • Available on all platforms
      • Ability to deliver embedded video on Midd site
      • Provide text in addition to video and audio files
    • Features that show off the sense of place and of people, some generated by communications, but others posted by members of the community. Example: photo-of-the week feature using some photos from professional photographers and some submitted by students, alumni, faculty, and staff; virtual tour; photo galleries; slideshows
  • Content and web pages that load quickly and are deliverable to web-capable cell phones, such as iPhone and Blackberry.
  • Course catalog that is easy to use, searchable, allows you to view multiple courses from different departments, and that pulls data into professors’ individual pages and potentially other locations on the Web site. In addition, the catalog needs to be archivable, since it has historical value as a snapshot of Middlebury in each year.
  • Personalized home page that enables the College to deliver information/content (emergency and HR info, events of interest, news headlines, etc.) to key audiences based on their personal preferences and the College’s need to provide critical information.

Easy Access to Information

Site should make access to information easy

  • Improve navigation (drop-down menu?)
  • Improve search
    • Consider artificial intelligence: ability for prospective students to type in a search term or questions and for the server to recognize what information they want and to deliver it.
      • “Ask Middlebury” feature, similar to Ask Jeeves. Ex: What if I don’t have a graded essay?
    • Provide search tool that allows you to type words directly into it
  • Robust site index-The Librarians’ Internet Index is an example of what we could do: http://lii.org. Example: If you wanted to find information about the College’s average class size, you could go to the index under, “statistics, Middlebury,” and find a hyperlinked list of sources, broken into categories and subcategories, containing statistical information.
  • Better access to tracking and analytics
  • Ability to easily share content from Facebook or other sites with colleagues on personalized pages
  • One log-on to get to all Middlebury sites. Consider using Facebook sign-on for Middlebury personalized page.
  • Provide html versions of all PDFs

Improve sharing of information within work groups and across campus

  • Develop a searchable database of stories, video, slideshow, quotes that can be used by communicators, admissions, and advancement to tell the Middlebury story.
  • Provide access to Moodle, twitter, or yammer on personalized page to get feedback from colleagues in work group and share documents and other content.
  • Improve the FTP site to make it easy to use and widely accessible.

Other

  • Customer service: provide a central (e-mail) point of contact for web site users. That person could then direct them to the correct department.
  • System for notifying collaborating departments when someone updates shared content on the Web site, ensuring that changes made on a page in one department are reflected in all place where that topic is featured.

Student Employment Office (SEO)

Stakeholder: Drew Macan and/or Laura Carotenuto

Web Redo Contact: Chris Norris
1.    Improve Job Description Listings
a.    Segment differently (ie. by dept?) so that supervisors can find easily.
b.    Roll up to headers?
c.    Have job number connected to position.

2.    Improve open position functionality
a.    Create list of applicants so supervisors could see all applicants for open positions with application materials
b.    Supervisor be able to access a list of their open positions all in one place and then click through to the applicant list for each job
c.    Students could see the status of positions for which they applied (“interviewing”, “filled”, etc.)
d.    A way for the student to save their application content and use it in more than one application.

3.    Investigate using OpenHire for SEO jobs.

4.    The ability to post short video instructions (how to apply for a job, how to complete payroll cards, etc.)

5.    Automated system to set up students in a job once hired – currently slated to become an EPAF.

6.    A customizable homepage for each student with an RSS feed from SEO so that we can push out information without resorting to emailing “All Students”.

Human Resources

Stakeholder: Drew Macan and/or Laura Carotenuto

WebRedo Contact: Chris Norris
1.    Make HR more prominent on the College’s home page.  Employees report having difficulty finding the HR site and request that it be placed on the home page.

2.    Set up a College-wide standard RSS profile for each type of user, including several different HR channels – one for employees, one for supervisors, and one for SEO – that would push HR-related info out to users.

3.    Users have told us it is a priority for them to be able to find things quickly on our web site.
a.    Content needs to be better organized by HR.
i.     Organize by function (employee, supervisor, retiree, etc.) Put the things that are most important to the employee at the top of the page.
ii.    Chunk information into smaller packages
iii.    Use headings and summaries more
iv.    Use FAQ’s
b.    Can we have a more targeted search function that returns results only from HR pages?
c.    Need solutions for posting large documents that we don’t own and can’t alter – like SPDs.  Indexing, book marking, some can be converted into a web document that would be searchable
d.    Make the Employee Handbook easier to find somehow.

4.    Users have told us that it is hard to find information they need at the College (HR-related or College wide)  The HR pages should help guide people to the right resources (electronic, paper, or person) for their question throughout the College.
a.    See #3
b.    Pictures of HR staff on web
c.    Content additions and clarifications
i.    the role of the ombuds person, staff appeals, etc.
ii.    “I have a question about…” link with most common questions listed?
5.    Ability to make changes frequently and easily to keep information relevant.

6.    Maintain links to other databases and applications (e.g. job descriptions, OpenHire, Student Employment)

7.    Make the pages more visually attractive to support the ability to find important things quickly.
a.    Able to support media (videos + pictures + audio)
b.    Bigger font sizes
c.    Icons and symbols
d.    Less “busy”

8.    Be able to support online training as a supplement to other types of training.
a.    Include an area for new employee orientation.
b.    Support the supervisor’s role in new employee orientation
c.    Support online trainings available from other organizations

9.    Support interactive forms. Find a solution for saving personal information so that multiple forms can be created from the same “file”.
(Chris – Discussed this a bit, seems like “fillable” PDFs would be a step in the right direction, though there are some privacy/PII concerns)

10.    Users have told us that a key component of their satisfaction with our service is getting a timely, personalized response from us.  How can the web site support this key indicator?
a.    Sprinkle links and email addresses throughout site content to make direct contact with HR staff one click away.

11.    Support online enrollment for HR programs – trainings, events, or presentations.

12.    Password protected area for information for supervisors.

13.    HR staff area
a.    Brainstorming and problems solving (spigit, wikis, etc)

Parton Health Center

Stakeholder: Mark Peluso

Web Redo Contact: Chris Norris

Top Health Center Website Needs
1.    Better visibility
a.    Direct presence on MC homepage
b.    Most requested info up front
c.    Hours
d.    Location
e.    Emergency info
f.    How to make an appt
g.    Health form info
h.    Easier to find “Contact Us” info

2.    Content-related
a.    Need more “self-service” content (ie. taking care of yourself)
b.    Types of visits
i.    What to expect
ii.    What to bring/prepare
c.    FAQ section (ie. top ten visit reasons)
d.    Staff profiles
e.    More downloadable forms (not online data collection!)

3.    Ease of Use
a.    Larger font
b.    Flexibility of font colors
c.    More white space
d.    “FUN” (go ask alice – Columbia.edu)
e.    “The Panther Speaks” (health tips)
f.    More visuals, fewer words (video tutorials of self-exams)

4.    Authoring
a.    Easy maintenance, needs to be easy