Wednesday, July 16, 2008
University of Missouri Recruiting Information Architect
One of the most fundamental roles in any web team is that of information architect. Though the site design is what everyone sees, if the information architecture of the site isn’t well thought through, the resulting site will be frustrating to visit and may not return the kinds of results you want.
And information architects should play a key role in evaluating a site, tracking searches and monitoring site use to make sure that the site is optimized for visitor needs--and to yield results for you.
The University of Missouri’s web team is looking to fill a vacancy for an information architect. Mizzou’s web team is one of the most progressive campus web units in the country and is blessed with great leadership (in the person of Lori Croy) and a supportive campus environment. In short, a great job for someone with the right skills.
Here’s a summary of the job:
Identify client goals; research audience needs; analyze information and create an overall plan for the layout of information and navigation for a Web site. Work with writers, photographers, designers, developers and programmers throughout the project to ensure that product meets both the client’s and end-users’ needs. Conduct usability assessments (cards sorts, interviews, etc.) and usability testing as needed. Educate staff and rest of campus Web community on current usability concepts. Monitor and analyze Web analytics for user trends that would impact the design and content delivered from sites and make recommendations based on these findings.
And the necessary qualifications:
2+ years of professional experience in information architecture, user interaction design or related field
Excellent analytical and problem solving skills. Ability to analyze and strategically organize large amounts of information.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Ability to work both independently and as part of a dynamic team of Web professionals consisting of writers, designers, developers, programmers and photographers.
Knowledge and demonstrated experience with current usability methodologies and user-centered design processes.
Experience conducting user validation and/or usability testing sessions; evaluating results and presenting actionable recommendations.
Knowledge of accessibility and Web Standards.
Experience analyzing and managing Google Analytics data and presenting actionable recommendations.
Proficiency with documentation tools such as Microsoft Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator and Visio or Omni Graffle.
Proficiency with XHTML, CSS, and cross-browser, cross-platform environments.
Official job description and particulars here.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 07/16 at 11:42 AM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Monday, July 14, 2008
The Future of Alumni Networking is at the Grass Roots
Meet your alumni where they are.
That’s a fair summary of the session entitled “The Future of Community and Affinity in an Online World” presented by Daniel Guhr, Andy Shaindlin from Caltech, and Louis Alexander from MIT at the CASE Summit on 13 July.
Guhr, from Illuminate Consulting Group, provided a fairly high-level view of today’s social networking environment. [I can’t reproduce Guhr’s slides, but a dramatic visual and a graph of activity on social networks is here.]
One of the most telling comments, as far as I’m concerned, is that today’s kids are participating in social networking environments like Club Penguin and Webkinz. They’ll continue networking as they graduate to Facebook (or, more likely, a successor) when they’re teens and ready to apply to and enter college. Then, after graduation, they’ll move into a corporate social network like the ones that are being built by McKinsey & Company and other large progressive networked organizations.
In any case, coming generations will live much of their social life online; the Internet will hold things together.
So in this environment, what use, really, is a closed, proprietary online network? Andy Shaindlin pointed out, “Today’s alumni have demonstrated quite clearly that they’ve decided what tools to use, and don’t care what you give them.” There are plenty of high-quality services that are easy to use, so it quite possible that in the future self-organizing groups of alumni could hold their own reunions without any input from an institution or alumni professionals.
Of course, that happened in the old days, too, when a group of alumni friends called each other on the phone and planned a weekend at the lake with their spouses. But it’s so much easier today.
Shaindlin pointed out that alumni relations professionals still think of alumni as “outside” the institution but now that they are increasingly holding a conversation about the institution without us, we are the outsiders. “They are at the center of the community and we visit them,” he noted.
Outsiders can still play a valuable role, however. A new model for alumni relations may be as the coach that helps these self-organizing groups connect with valuable institutional resources and coaxes them into meeting institutional goals.
MIT’s Alumni Association has worked with entering students through a Facebook presence for four years now (the first class of students with whom the Institute’s alumni office has had a Facebook-mediated relationship just graduated). Lou Alexander pointed out that “we can’t control the content or direction of these conversations, but we do want to be part of them and influence them.”
This past year, the Alumni Association used Facebook to identify leaders for the Senior Gift program and these students made their asks using Facebook. He reported: “In the first year of Facebook, participation in the senior class gift almost doubled (to 51 %). Last year, it jumped to 64%.” Sounds as if meeting people where they are makes good sense.
The primary shift taking place: the university or institution once held the information necessary for the alumni network to scale and the only way that alumni could access that network was to play by whatever rules the institution made up and to use its system. That’s changed: now the power is with the people and the conversations are going on without the institution mediating them. It’s a powerful paradigm shift, and alumni relations professionals need to be prepared for it to happen--and probably sooner rather than later.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 07/14 at 07:38 AM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Blogging the CASE Summit
You, too can “attend” some of the best sessions at next weeks CASE Summit, even if you’re not headed to Manhattan for the event. I don’t know of plans to webcast or otherwise distribute sessions from the event, but I do know that I’ll be blogging about sessions of interest (to me, and perhaps, you). And CASE has established an official conference blog.
The Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s Summit for Advancement Leaders is CASE’s premier gathering. Unlike the District Conferences and the many CASE discipline-focused workshops and conferences, the Summit is designed to provide sessions that are more big-picture- and strategy-focused. This years topics include a session covering the upcoming election with a couple of heavy-hitting politicos (including Frank Luntz, who provided strategic messaging and polling for many Republicans in the past several election cycles); and many topics related to issues specific to education.
You can find out more about the Summit program here, and follow CASE’s blog until the conference ends on Tuesday. You can also sign up for notification of new posts via RSS. And you can follow my posts here on mStoner’s own blog.
One of the CASE bloggers is Andy Shaindlin, who writes the Alumni Futures blog and is one of the most cogent thinkers about the changing role of alumni relations in advancement and the challenges of communicating with key audiences in the era of wildly proliferating communications (and social networking) choices for everyone.
Shaindlin’s first post on the CASE blog explores the “biggest” risk in social networking for higher ed administrators.
Quick: what would your answer be? What’s the biggest risk in an investment in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn--or any of the other social network environments?
Here’s what Andy says:
Want to know whether social networks are “worth it”? Try some of them out. Want to know which features will work on your site? Try them on someone else’s site and then make up your own mind. The biggest risk to higher ed’s use of online networks won’t be choosing the “wrong” tools, or using them the “wrong” way. It will be failing to experiment because we’re afraid of making mistakes. That will inevitably perpetuate the usual trend of only doing what someone else has already done, instead of inventing something new that might benefit our alumni even more.
I’m with Andy: stop worrying about making a mistake and dive in. I’m betting that your alumni will be more forgiving than you imagine. And they might even applaud your efforts.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 07/10 at 02:28 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Yes, That Was an mStoner Employee You Saw at the Annual AIGA Members Meeting
One of the things I am trying to do as Design Director for mStoner is increase our visibility and reputation within the design community. I believe that raising the bar for what we do with our own design work will help raise the bar for design throughout the field of higher and secondary education.
To support this goal, I attend AIGA events representing mStoner, such as the Chicago Annual Member Meeting last Thursday, hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art4. During the reception5 I ran into some old friends including Andrew Dembitz of Unisource (who used to help me out on a variety of print projects), Andy Eltzroth2 of Tandemodus (who I attended IU with), Mike Biersma7 of Biersma Creative (that’s him on the left and me on the right), and last but not least, Joseph Essex6 (former employer and an early mentor of mine) of Essex Two.
Art Paul1, former creative director of Playboy, and Jilly Simons3 of Concrete were honored as AIGA Fellows this year. One of Art Paul’s main contributions to the design community is his very progressive approach to the use of illustration and fine arts as a way of framing editorial content. In over 20 years as principal of Concrete, Jilly has earned celebrity status (at least in design circles) for intelligent, compelling work.
Posted by Doug Gapinski on 06/18 at 04:01 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Obama Campaign Far Ahead in Use of the Internet
While political analysts (and--one hopes--voters) will parse the platforms of the presidential candidates, there’s no doubt which of the candidates is using a multitude of new marketing tools and techniques to his advantage, both during the primaries and, especially, now that he’s entering the general election. Anyone interested in watching the state-of-the art when it comes to using the Internet for campaigning, fundraising, marketing, and PR need look no further than BarackObama.com.
Obama’s campaign has been widely lauded for its brilliant use of the Internet and social networking. And it’s one reason he has such strong generational appeal.
Here’s just one take, by Shelly Palmer, and another by Noam Cohen at the New York Times, dubbing the campaign ”The Wiki-Way to the Nomination”.
Cohen observes,
But at the same time, Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer — the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software” movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign — “openness and transparency and participation” — were ones he said “merged perfectly” with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.”
In ”The Amazing Money Machine,” Joshua Green notes that the Obama campaign raised $55 million in February, without the candidate having to host one fundraiser. Contrast this to John McCain’s foray to Denver in May. McCain was forced into a tricky dance; while President Bush raised money for him, McCain had to avoid being seen in public with him to avoid too much identification with his unpopular policies, not to mention his person.
Green’s article explores how Obama has managed to take advantage of three major changes since the 2004 election when Howard Dean’s campaign pioneered web-based communications and fundrasing for an upstart candidate. What’s amazing about the Obama campaign is this:
What’s intriguing to Democrats and worrisome to Republicans is how someone lacking these deep connections to traditional sources of wealth could raise so much money so quickly. How did he do it? The answer is that he built a fund-raising machine quite unlike anything seen before in national politics. Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, veteran activists and first-time contributors, and—especially—anyone who is wired to anything: computer, cell phone, PDA.
Green shows how many in Silicon Valley came to support Obama. Engineers, venture capitalists, and others in the Valley are used to smart, young entrepreneurs starting companies that quickly dominate a niche [think Google, begun by two Stanford students]. To them, Obama’s age or lack of experience in Washington wasn’t a put off; they were attracted by his charisma and brains and out their experience and technology to work for him.
Opportunities for engagement
The Obama Campaign’s website offers a huge number of opportunities for engagement. Create your own site; develop a network; join a Facebook group. If you visit the site, you can note all the social networking sites where the campaign has a presence, and then check out Obama’s presence on some of them.
In his New York Times article, Cohen observes,
Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor whose book “The Wealth of Networks” is a manifesto for online collaboration, points out a crucial difference between Mr. Obama’s approach to attracting supporters and that of his chief rivals. “On the McCain and Clinton Web sites, there is a transactional screen,” Mr. Benkler said. “It is just about the money. Donate, then we can build the relationship. In Obama’s it’s inverted: build the relationship and then donate.”
Also, note all the video that appears on Obama’s site. Lots of it. Speeches, policy comments, from lots of venues, on lots of issues. From the candidate (who looks good on TV) and from ordinary people. There’s also an Obama channel on Youtube; on 14 June, there were 1,103 videos posted, with 51,382,633 views. The McCain channel, in contrast, had 207 videos with 3,753,163 views.
Squelching the rumors
As Obama gained more attention in the primary, rumors began to circulate on the Net via emails and in right wing blogs; you may have heard about some of them: Obama is a Muslim; Michelle Obama has called white people “whitey,” and others. The media has reported that the Obama campaign was concerned that these, and even worse rumors, would form the basis for attacks against their candidate a la the Swift Boat Veterans attacks against John Kerry in the 2004 campaign.
So this week, Obama launched Fight the Smears, a site that is devoted to addressing the rumors and lies about the candidate. If you Googled the phrase “barack obama is a muslim” on Friday, the first two links were from Snopes.com and urbanlegends.about.com--both sites that debunk rumors. [A sponsored link by Human Events offers an anti-Obama tract.] By Saturday, the first links for that phrase were to news reports about the Fight the Smear site.
As media outlets and members of the Obama campaign begin to link to Fight the Smear, I’ll wager that soon the first several pages of links that show up for these rumors will lead to the campaign’s own site. You’ll still be able to find the anti-Obama sites, but unless they pay for links, they’ll be buried in the Google results.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 06/14 at 04:43 PM(2) Comments | Permalink |
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Kent Photoshoot: an Exercise in Decentralized Authorship
Legend, clockwise from top left:
Mark Ostow shooting at the Kent Athletic Field
Morning, outside one of the dorms
Student Photo (Charlie Spatz) of another student at Rock Day
Kent School from across the Housatonic River
Photo crew and student take shelter from rain during a shot
Student Photo (Mike Graae) of student production of the musical "Urinetown"
A couple of weeks ago, we had another opportunity to work with photographer Mark Ostow on a project for Kent, an excellent boarding school located in Connecticut. One of the things we were able to try with this photoshoot is an idea that Michael Stoner mentioned to me over a year ago—that we might recruit students to help visually tell the story of a school, and populate the website using student photography. It’s an idea that I kept in my back pocket until the right project came along, and that project happened to be for Kent.
I love the idea using student photos to populate the website of a school they attend because 1) it’s a truly authentic way of showing what it’s like to be at the school - from a young person’s perspective and 2) using multiple photographers supports the idea of decentralized authorship. By having multiple people add to the photographic library, the library becomes representative of multiple points of view, rather than one person’s take on what the school is. To support this idea further, Kent is going to continue to have students shoot the school each year, which means their photo library will be nice and current over the next few years.
The way we managed the shoot: we still had Mark Ostow and his team of photographers shooting professional, magazine-quality shots. Mark also led a workshop with four students who had expressed interest in shooting photography for the website. The workshop involved examining work from each student, giving them assignements, and then collecting images and reviewing them together in a critique session.
As part of this project, and before the site goes live, we’re setting up all of the professional and student images from the shoot in Adobe Bridge with intelligent recommendations for folder structure and tagging images. This method of archiving will mean that our client will be able to easily search and find images by category, year, author, subject matter, and more.
Posted by Doug Gapinski on 06/12 at 02:17 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Monday, June 09, 2008
Email: Still the “Killer App”
I’ve worked in the online sphere since 1995, and I really can’t remember a time when email wasn’t dubbed a ”killer app.”
A new study confirms that the moniker still applies. (The grain of salt: It was conducted on behalf of a company that specializes in email.)
A few of the study’s findings that caught my eye:
- 67 percent of respondents prefer email as a communications channel over other online vehicles. (Take that, Web 2.0!)
- Monthly emails and content and frequency options positively impacted a company’s reputation. (Here’s an earlier post on this topic.)
- Email will be as central to online commerce and communications in the future as it is today.
- More than 88 percent of respondents said they would like organizations to give them more choices over the content and frequency of the emails they receive, including options on advertisements, special offers, articles, newsletters, white papers and other specific content options.
The last bulleted point is an important one. That’s true not only because of the significant response, but also because creating a system that accurately reflects the many kinds of emails sent by a college or university is a big job. I know, because I’ve been there.
In my previous life as a web director at a large public university, I was part of a group tasked with creating efficient methods for alumni and friends to manage their email preferences. Using email addresses pulled from the institutional database, we sent mass emails to hundreds of groups--folks who graduated from specific academic programs; people who attended arts or athletic events; participants in outreach activities. All these and countless fundraising appeals, several dozen e-newsletters, plus the occasional survey.
The email calendar often was jam-packed in December, when there’d also be numerous holiday greetings; lots of year-end e-solicitations; and football bowl tours and game information ... at least in winning years. One December, we had a mass email scheduled every work day for three weeks straight. Most of those were sent to small groups; even so, there was plenty of audience cross over.
Plus we knew that some units maintained their own email lists and sent mass emails that we didn’t know about until they occasionally landed in our in-boxes.
The institution’s policy was that each email offered the option of unsubscribing from that specific type group (e.g., e-solicitations from the College of Engineering). We established dozens and dozens of email drop codes in the institutional database, so users could make discrete decisions about the type of emails they wanted to receive.
Managing those codes became a challenge. We needed enough to accurately reflect the audience segments. But we didn’t want them to proliferate so much as to become unwieldy. On the web page where users could select their email preferences, we listed all the popular options, but omitted some of the more esoteric groups. The system worked, but it didn’t offer the user the level of control requested by 88 percent of study participants.
It takes a savvy and complex system to accurately reflect the nuances and diverse audience segments of a large, multi-faceted organization.
Nine out of 10 in this study wanted more control over the kinds of emails they receive. That statistic clearly confirms that a regular and systematic review of the email preferences web interface available to alumni and friends is time well spent.
Posted by Hilery Livengood on 06/09 at 09:11 AM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Web Policy
Happy Sunday, all! Dee Ann Rexroat from Cornell College shared with me the College’s new web policy:
http://cornellcollege.edu/information_technology/technology_policy/www_site.shtml
From Dee Ann:
“The updated version includes a mission statement and outlines responsibilities for official sites by the Office of College Communications, Information Technology, the Academic Media Studio, and each academic and administrative department. It also covers restrictions for commercial activity and outlines expectations for official pages, course pages, student organization pages, personal pages, and commercial (Bookstore and Sodexo) pages. There is a new section on regulation of Web pages and policies for removing pages that don’t follow policy.”
Dee Ann gave me permission to share the link with anyone who was looking for models upon which to base their own policies. Thanks, Dee Ann! And if anyone else has models they’d like to share, bring it.
Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran on 06/08 at 09:14 AM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Friday, June 06, 2008
Getting It Means Getting It Right
In smart and pointed AdAge column, Greg Anderson reminds marketers that it’s far more important to understand why and how you’re using nontraditional media than to use it awkwardly.
He says:
In a media environment that is increasingly defined by the trendiness that afflicts a whole bunch of other categories, brands run the risk of looking like I must have looked to my niece when I joined Facebook and sent her a friend invite: an outsider trying to seem with it, unsure of why we’re there or what we’re supposed to do to become a valuable member of the community. We’re the awkward adults with disposable income but no idea what’s really going on around us. But we’re there, damn it. And that makes us cool. We bought the sneakers and the ironic T-shirt. We’re one of you. Want to be friends?
Anderson contrasts how Apple and Pizza Hut use Facebook. Apple does it right. Its Apple Students Community on Facebook has nearly 500,000 members and 15,000 discussion topics and allows members to share their content. That’s what Facebook is all about--and it’s a bullseye.
As for Pizza Hut, well, there are about 40,000 fans; 11 discussion topics; and 214 wall posts. Is that success?
As Anderson points out, it’s not just trendiness that results in wholesale movements from one environment to another. It’s partly due to co-option of a popular environment by the largely clueless, including many marketers who jump in without understanding the mores of the space they’re entering:
Ironically, bad marketing is also part of the reason that people like my niece are leaving one setting and moving on to the next new thing where we’re not clumsily asking them if they want to be friends. The social-networking environment is littered with irrelevant brand applications. But bad brand behaviors aren’t just limited to the confines of media segments such as social-networking sites or to the younger people who tend to hang there. Media innovation has opened up all kinds of new ways for us to embarrass ourselves. Applications that allow people to create, publish, search, categorize, store, share, filter, automate and connect are being misused everywhere.
This is one reason why marketers who’ve embraced image-oriented emails are having delivery problems. Online Media Daily published this story yesterday: Study: Image-Oriented Emails Not Getting Delivered. Turns out that a lot of people [I’m one of them!] set their email clients with “images off.” That really screws up email that hasn’t been formatted properly.
Jordan Ayan, CEO of SubscriberMail, said:
“… email marketers must design emails to work with and without images present and test to ensure optimal image rendering. Marketers whose design accounted for image suppression reported impressive lifts in key performance areas. Still, a significant percent of email marketers realize this issue, yet fail to take action to address it.”
Well, duh!
This is so obvious that I’d almost be embarrassed to say it. The fact that Ayan does is because of the follow-the-herd mentality that Greg Anderson writes about.
The study revealed:
… that 23% of retailers send emails that are completely unintelligible when images are blocked. Of the 77% that sent intelligible emails, there were significant variations in clarity based on their use of HTML text and alt tags. Only 42% of retailers designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% of retailers used alt tags on their images adequately or extensively. A marketer’s use of HTML text and alt tags are major determinants of the intelligibility of their emails.
And guess what: “By optimizing emails for image suppression, double-digit percentage improvements are possible ....” What an absolutely shocking discovery!
So even though in 2008 email should’t be a nontraditional medium, we get back to Greg Anderson’s point: it’s far more important to understand why and how you’re using nontraditional media than to use it awkwardly.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 06/06 at 03:09 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
How unique should your institution’s website really be?
A few weeks ago I was in a new business pitch with a couple colleagues talking about a website redesign project for a small (but growing) public college. We were discussing the topic of information architecture and how mStoner goes about the process of reorganizing a college website. One of the participants from the college had a few questions about how it all works - which I’ll paraphrase…
Potential Client: “Do you have an existing information architecture template that you use for a college that you’ll simply apply to our school?”
Me: “Nope. But what we do have is lots of experience doing this and a lot of ideas about how to initially create the framework for an IA that flexible, scalable and most importantly understandable. Some percentage of it is the same as other school websites (and should be) and some percentage is entirely unique to your school (and also should be).”
Potential Client: “I see. What percentage of our information architecture should be the same as other schools and what percentage should be totally unique?”
Me: “Ummm...”
I have to admit that I’d never thought about IA in terms of absolute percentages before. Since that question though, I’ve thought about it a lot. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
The top-level information architecture of your website should be 2/3 the same as other schools and 1/3 unique to your school. That’s obviously not set in stone but I think it’s a helpful guide for thinking about the global navigation of your site.
Let’s assume your site is composed of three types of navigation: topic-based, audience-based and task-based. If those three things are in place you can begin to figure out what should follow the model of other schools and what should be distinctly your own.
Topic-based
Schools interested in reaching prospective students should ALL have the following links in their topic nav:
About Us
Academics
Admission
Campus Life (or something of the sort)
News & Events
Giving (or something of the sort)
Once the basics are covered it’s more a matter of choosing what’s right for a given institution. If sports are a reasonably large part of the on campus experience then ‘Athletics’ should have a place in the navigation. We also place ‘Research’ in the topic-based navigation for many clients. And in the past we’ve included ‘Arts’, ‘Institutes’, ‘Service’ and/or ‘Libraries’. The idea being, we’re sure that the first six links listed are necessities - from there it’s much more a matter of which links belong on your top-level navigation. And that’s a decision that driven by the messages you’re trying to send prospective students, the personality of your school, the goals of your website and the tasks you’re trying to facilitate.
Audience-based
Should definitely have:
Current Students
Faculty & Staff
Parents
Alumni
After that, it’s wide open. in previous projects we’ve included, “Neighbors”, “Business Community”, “Managing Committee” and countless others. Once you’ve done the work of identifying your audiences it makes sense to highlight them prominently on navigation of this sort. And yes, the omission of a ‘Prospective Students’ link was intentional.
Task-based
This navigation is a whole lot less prescriptive than the other types. It should include a link to ‘Contact’ and a link to ‘Search’. Other than that it should include as many other links to get stuff done as you have. “Apply Online”, “Directory”, “Site Map”, etc.
Obviously this is just the tip of the proverbial ice-burg but I think it’s a nice, neutral place to start a discussion about information architecture for a school’s global navigation.
Later in the same conversation with the potential client we talked about how these percentages might apply to design. What percentage of the design should look like other schools? What percentage should be totally different? That response merits a blog posting of its own - which is forthcoming.
(4) Comments | Permalink |
