Author Archives: Jess Isler

About Jess Isler

http://go.middlebury.edu/askus Liaison to Dance, Theatre, and Studio Art, Music Cataloger, LIS Website Team Leader.

Usability Testing the LIS Website (Part 2)

Presenting part 2 of 2 blog posts describing usability testing methods of the LIS Website team (as promised in the Usabilla post).

The Team presented the results of our findings at a meeting with Area Directors and since the presentation itself does a good job of providing an overview of the other tools we used, here it is: Web Team Recommendations.  We will be passing the torch to a new iteration of the LIS Website team soon.  They will be charged with following up on the status of these recommendations (among other tasks). In addition, we’ll be sharing these recommendations directly with the people in charge of the specific areas of the site.

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Customize your LIS blog subscriptions

Are you sick of automatically getting every last post and comment from this blog fed to your RSS reader or your email? Think ★ The Essentials is anything BUT essential? Don’t despair–you have options to get just the blog posts or comments you need. Continue reading

LIS website usability testing

The LIS Website team invites LIS Staff to help us out with our usability testing activities. Many of you have already been involved–either through your work during the building phases of our site, or by sending us feedback about the site–and we thank you for your input. We will be incorporating these observations into our recommendations for changes and adjustments to the site.

As we turn our focus to usability testing in the form of observational testing sessions, we want to provide the opportunity for interested LIS staff to participate. The LIS Website team’s current usability testing plan involves using an audio/video/screencapture tool, and coordinating and conducting testing with student, faculty, and staff testers (along with other methods).

Please note: if you submitted questions to the usability testing form that was previously advertised, you do not need to resubmit them—we have them in hand and will incorporate them into our testing. If you have additional tasks or questions you feel are essential for testing, please send them to liswebteam@middlebury.edu. If you are interested in helping us with the testing, please let us know by emailing the team. Thank you!

Categories and Tags

Blog categories and tags: what they mean and when to use them

Categories = Audience

Tags = Description

LIS Website Team confession: As a team we’ve struggled with a way to articulate to everyone how and why we structured the categories on this blog in the way that we did, and how we intend categories and tags to be used. Hopefully this explanation will provide a useful distinction between the two, and give both post authors and blog readers guidance for how to use them.

Categories (Select your audience)

Use a category to reach an audience (or several).

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LIS Website Information Architecture

Team, please find the new article here, and have at it!:

LIS Website Information Architecture

(Also linked from our team wiki page.)

FYI: This follows the IA documents White Whale created for other parts of the College web redo project. It’s primarily a high-level guide to page & subpage structure, not a detailed list of page contents (though there are some content recommendations in the notes sections). See middfiles:\orgs\WebMakeover\IA Documents for examples (I used Academics when creating the wiki page.)

LIS landing page and the blog

How will the LIS landing page point to the Blog? I don’t think we’ve discussed whether or not our landing pages will contain a link to the blog, a feed to the blog, or both.

If we had both, would it make sense to have a link going to the whole blog, and a feed listing only our outward-facing category posts (and only displaying 2 or 3 posts so as not to clutter the page)?

e.g.

LIS landing page:

  • Link to all blog
  • Feed with Good to know(/TBD)

The LIS landing page is the only place where we have to make this determination, correct? (Since primary contacts are deciding what goes on their pages.)