Tag Archives: menus

Controller

Stakeholder: Cindy Wemette

Web Makeover Contact:  Jai Shankar

  • Ability to customize web page, fonts, pictures, colors
  • Secure access links – place to put information for audit committee or external auditors.
  • Drop and Drag capabilities
  • Pull drop menus
  • Secure log in to own web page
  • Pop up of most recent visited sites
  • On line service – fill in forms; ability to email fill in forms
  • Search box
  • A – Z menu
  • Ability to post power point presentations or videos for training
  • Blog
  • Communications pop up vs. sending all staff all faculty emails
  • Current events section – Up coming events
  • Streaming data across top or bottom of page, example: financial news or ticker symbols

Sponsored Research Office

Jim Ralph, Dean of Faculty Development and Research

Franci Farnsworth, Coordinator of Sponsored Research

Alison Darrow, Science Grants and Writing Facilitator

Our website serves several constituents:

  • the Controller’s office: we host their grant-related policies and information
  • faculty seeking grants: we supply tips, data, institutional policies & guidelines, forms, etc. to help guide proposal writing and application
  • Advancement’s office of Corporate and Foundation Relations: we share some policies and procedures, which are hosted at our site
  • the Dean of Faculty Development and Research: our site announces faculty grants and annual reports of grants awarded, a key way to celebrate faculty successes

We are a two-person office that reports to the DFDR; both of us maintain and update the site. Out offices are spread throughout campus (the Library, Bi Hall, Old Chapel), so sharing information electronically is crucial. The current site is an artifact of dumping old paper-based documents online in order to have at least some web resource and then not having the time to update or redesign. As a result, the site doesn’t invite active engagement and participation and is static and text-heavy. Faculty currently underuse our site, probably because it’s easier to just call us than it is to find and use information at our site. Revision and redesign is now ongoing, but a lot of what we do is still email-driven.

What we hope for from a new site:

  • an easier and more intuitive way to add linked pages, to help break up long blocks of text a way to add pop-ups, drop-down menus, etc., to keep users from having to navigate to other pages for short bits of supporting or related information
  • an easier way to “hide” and control access to sensitive and confidential content
  • ability to assign levels of access for stuff the office shares: currently we use Google docs for our department “whiteboard”
  • access for many users (including faculty and student workers) to edit the site and notify us easily so we can approve content before publishing it
  • dynamic linking to other departments’ information, through Banner and other means, so that redundant updates aren’t necessary
  • a platform-neutral system
  • ability to edit the site remotely

Features that would improve efficiency and help our workflow:

  • customized user profiles
  • a shared calendar
  • an anual grants-deadline calendar with a way to let faculty subscribe to alerts and reminders (currently we have to spam them)
  • a way to let faculty notify us that they plan to apply for specific grants
  • ability to dynamically link to and from faculty CVs and other content required for proposal writing (Institutional Research data especially; links with the library’s thesis archive; central database for faculty publications/achievements; faculty pages; career-path info for science alums, etc.)

Types of interactivity that would help our office communicate more effectively:

  • drop-down menus and pop-up windows so we don’t need to link to new pages – would flatten and simplify navigation considerably
  • an index of terms & acronyms (offices, agencies, etc)
  • dynamic timelines, checklists, and other forms that could be filled out online
  • calculators, worksheets, spreadsheets with College and funding rates and percentages built in
  • dynamic comments (e.g., user-contribute FAQ)
  • feeds of sponsored & relevant events, such as guideline updates, workshops
    & seminars
  • integrated links to Banner information
  • dynamic link updating, so that if material shared with another department is moved, the link on our page still works (or we’re notified to fix it)

Examples of functionality, design, and features from other colleges or industries that we like and admire:

  • Google docs: clean, simple, fast, super-easy to use and share
  • Google calendar: ditto
  • Boston University: clean, uncluttered design, yet there’s a lot going on; really like the tabbed navigation on the Home page and the way each tab slides aside to launch a video, interactive map, etc. (and that user has the option to interact or not).
  • The Daily Beast: the Cheat Sheet is a great feature

Current functionality of the Middlebury site and CMS:

    Editing is OK but clunky and subject to unexpected results; especially formatting carrying over when you cut & paste. It would be helpful to be able to see formatting tags (toggle on and off) so we could find and fix weirdness. Currently sometimes have to delete and redo because we can’t figure out how to fix the formatting.
    When Save refreshes the screen, it puts you at the top of the page: very annoying to have to scroll back down! Would be easier if it refreshed to where you left off.
    Hyperlink Mgr is great, very easy to use. Same with uploading documents.
    Really hate the way the right sidebar either doesn’t reflect the page titles or creates redundancy – not certain what creates this problem – editing page titles after they’re created? If so, the sidebar should reflect any changes to the page titles dynamically. Right now, we’re not even sure the sidebar can be changed, once created.
    More flexibility with fonts and text size would be nice.

Schools Abroad

Form of contact: Meeting with Coordinators and Senior Staff

Stakeholder: Liz Ross and Jeff Cason

WebRedo Contact: Jamie Northrup

Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/sa

Brief:

Requirements:

  • Easier navigation- drop downs
  • some interactive features like discussion/blog/wiki
  • a ‘discussion’ where students can post, but the postings are only viewed by administrator.
  • We currently have on-line application for non-Midd students applying to Schools Abroad.  It will be very help for advisors/faculty to be able to submit references electronically as well; currently they can just download a PDF and then send it to us.
  • Possibly create a system so that study abroad advisors at other institutions can track students’ applications to see what stage in the process they are in.
  • Being able to send emails to batches of students (Midd/NonMidd/Term Abroad would be handy, though we can access this info now with FMP, or Excel sheets for those of us who keep Banner records in Excel
  • Ability to upload and maintain forms on the www site
  • Option for text-only loading; useful for students abroad in minimal connection environments (e.g. Russia)
  • Directory – improvement would be to search the directory/website directly from the homepage rather than having to click on the link to the directory page.   Also it’s good that there is a drop-down menu for departments, but “student” would be a choice.  And now that it’s been upgraded, the results are shown below (on my screen/browser) the search screen, so you have to scroll to see the results, when really, once I’ve search, that part of the screen could go away.
  • Segue: the text formatting is terrible (it reformats however it likes and doesn’t allow you to change the formatting once on the interface).  This means that unless you’re typing everything from scratch on Segue, the formatting is screwy.  Also, the “son of segue” version, which lacks the quiz function, makes it less useful.
  • Event registration: I like the automatic reply that tells you your event has been submitted successfully, and I like the on-line calendar/room availability feature-it saves a lot of back and forth. On-line forms, such as Events Scheduling, is useful and works well.
  • Student Worker job posting: VERY easy to use-I wouldn’t change a thing, but there has got to be a way to electronically submit a student payroll authorization form.
  • KeySurvey-This seems to be working well, now that we have a departmental account and can steal from one another’s surveys.  The inability to run a report by respondent and hide the email (making them cease to be anonymous) can be problematic.
  • CMS.  I especially like the ability to “replace” old documents.  It’s recently been proven problematic when we link to a server (on-line application, for example) without the “go” url-and then the server we’ve linked to is off-line.  It’s difficult to know what he “go” addresses are and when to use them if we haven’t created them.  The other problems I have are the bulleted lists (if you remove a bulleted list, I can never get that final bullet to delete) and the multiple pastings of text (instead of inserting a new paragraph, often it will insert it twice-and you can’t always just go in and delete the second one).  Much better in this version than the past is the ability to change the size of an existing table and align pictures/wrap text. It would be nice if the Resource Manager saved resources in either alphabetical or chronological order…some type of searchable order (any order really) would be nice rather than the apparent randomization it uses now.
  • Being able to submit grades online (Blackboard has this functionality)

Athletics

Form of contact: Meeting with Coaches, AD, and Stakeholder

Stakeholder: Brad Nadeau

WebRedo Contact: Jamie Northrup

Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/athletics

Brief: The Athletics Department is interested in a few key areas- a more interactive site overall with photos, video, and interaction, the ability to customize individual team pages, and a better recruiting interface.

Athletics Requirements:

  • Upload/display/show/imbed video
  • Mobile score updates through current scoreboard interface designed by web services
  • Easy blogging for coaches
  • Easily upload audio sound/interviews to be played
  • Online store through bookstore to sell athletic merchandise
  • Flexibility for displaying different fonts/colors/sizes of text etc…
  • Ability for podcasts/RSS feeds
  • Way to display photos for potential purchase, thumbnails, full-size etc. aka-photo store
  • Top level visibility (don’t hide athletics)
  • Athletics template that can be customized with photos
  • Athletics wants to design/control IA for their site
  • Want mouse-over / menu display functionality
  • New recruiting functionality