June 30, 2009 • 4:31 pm 0
I love, love, love this video. To this day, I vividly remember being in kindergarden and playing in a sort of tinkering room I got to go to about once a week. The room included all kinds of wood blocks, real hammers, nails, screwdrivers, etc. (in a public school, no less), and we were allowed to just mess around in there for about half-an-hour — the best half-hour of the week.
Filed under: Uncategorized
May 5, 2009 • 3:20 am 0
Just wanted to make a quick note that I’ve moved my portfolio and résumé back to my old stomping grounds, carmentastreet.com, complete with a fresh design.
Filed under: about the notebook
December 3, 2008 • 12:39 am 0
One of these days I’ll get around to writing a proper post about my summer fellowship project, but for now, I’ll just mention that IU put up a press release about it today! Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: css, human-centered design, xhtml
October 24, 2008 • 11:39 pm 0
“In Bogota, our goal was to make a city for all the children. The measure of a good city is one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can safely go anywhere. If a city is good for children, it will be good for everybody else. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: capstone, graduate school, human-centered design, outside reading, urban planning
October 20, 2008 • 10:31 pm 0
From an old post I started and never published in Feb. 2008:
In my Experience Design course, we’re spending the month of February talking about experience design criticism and how it can inform our work. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: This required reading just Blew My Mind., graduate school, human-centered design
October 9, 2008 • 11:39 pm 0
Last week in Interaction Design Methods, we collected all the research our team has been conducting this semester and created an affinity diagram.
Affinity diagramming takes a long time — bring rations!
It was a grueling process to transfer all our notes to post-its and arrange them into categories that made sense, but in the end, we developed some helpful insights that have pushed us further toward nailing down a design direction for our project.
As a team, we were surprised at the usefulness of the resulting diagram because our research had been seemingly unrelated up to that point — contextual inquiry with the city volunteer-matching program, ethnography at a local community garden, and a focus group of Bloomington citizens about their attitudes toward “buying local.”
L to R: Me, Augusto, and Xiahan, transferring our research data to post-its
I’m eager to try this method out again with a future project — definitely with my capstone. Our instructor and associate instructor were nice enough to provide us with pictures of the workshop.
Filed under: affinity diagram, graduate school, human-centered design, methods
September 28, 2008 • 2:05 am 0
“The addiction to objects is of course best cured by learning to discipline consciousness. If one develops control over the processes of the mind, the need to keep thoughts and feelings in shape by leaning on things decreases. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: This required reading just Blew My Mind., graduate school
September 19, 2008 • 7:31 pm 0
The Task Force for Sustainability at Indiana University wanted to create an interactive map that would make students, staff, and faculty more aware of sustainable choices for their commute to campus.
As a summer graduate fellow, I was in charge of researching and implementing the project — user research, interface design, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, Google Maps API, and usability evaluation.
Filed under: case study, portfolio
September 13, 2008 • 7:33 pm 0
The Ottawa Citizen recently posted a story about a developer in Texas who used some participatory design techniques to involve local women from the community in the creation of a new shopping center. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: human-centered design, outside reading
September 12, 2008 • 11:28 am 0
I am loving this new article in A List Apart, “Look at It Another Way,” written by Indi Young of Adaptive Path. It’s incredibly reflective of what we talk about every day in my master’s program.
Filed under: human-centered design, outside reading
• 8:43 am 0
We could talk all day about why terrible tools are so prevalent. (In my experience, the reason why a terrible tool isn’t replaced is because someone senior paid $500,000 for it and sure as hell isn’t going to admit a mistake and scrap it.)
- From Accessibility in a Suit and Tie by Bruce Lawson, for Vitamin
Filed under: accessibility, human-centered design, outside reading
September 1, 2008 • 11:30 am 0
The Indiana University Herbarium director and his student assistants were in the process of creating a Microsoft Access database of all the native species of Indiana plants — accounting not only for their current scientific names but also for their informal names and any historic, but now inaccurate, scientific names. They needed help with the database design and the creation of an easy-to-use interface for inputting and looking up species records.
Herbarium database form for entering legacy plant names (click to enlarge)
Filed under: case study, contextual inquiry, human-centered design, portfolio, user interviews
• 5:54 am 0
The Office of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia needed to refocus its website architecture, content, and interface design to more effectively meet the needs of graduate school applicants and current students.
Filed under: MU Grad School redesign, accessibility, card sort, case study, competition analysis, content inventory, css, editing, graphic design, human-centered design, information architecture, portfolio, usability testing, user interviews, wireframes, xhtml
August 23, 2008 • 12:19 pm 0
My favorite line of the New York Times story about Igor, the infamous Toronto bike thief:
As the police gathered the mounds of bikes, they also found cocaine, crack cocaine, about 15 pounds of marijuana and a stolen bronze sculpture of a centaur and a snake in battle.
Because even heartless bike thieves appreciate the finer things.
Filed under: current events
June 18, 2008 • 9:28 am 0
The newspaper graphics for the Boston Globe on Javier Zarracina’s portfolio site are out of this world. I came across them in the perfect way — a post from Lifehacker about the naps graphic (watch out for the window resizing when you click through), not highlighting the design itself, but the information it conveys. I was totally engrossed and spent significant time with it, reading every word.
When I was in journalism school, there seemed to be a general feeling that newspapers like USA Today ushered in an era of dumbed-down print media through greater use of graphics and lower word counts at the expense of the almighty writer’s more detailed coverage. Although I agree that some stories require the unique type of in-depth investigation that a long-form story can provide, Zarracina’s graphics exemplify the effectiveness of human-centered design created through collaboration of writers and artists.
Filed under: human-centered design
June 6, 2008 • 11:19 am 0
In the video below, Ira Glass talks about accepting and getting through that time we all experience, where the work we produce is not as good as our own ideas of what good work looks like. Even though he’s talking specifically about radio writing and reporting here, as many other bloggers have pointed out, his pep talk can be applied to any skill we are in the process of developing.
I’ve just finished my first year as a master’s student studying interaction research and design, and it has definitely been a humbling experience for me. The type of work I hope to build a career around requires a keen critical eye in combination with research and design skills that will take me years to fully develop. This video was a comforting reminder that hard work and dedication really does pay off in the end, even if you have to spend significant time bumbling around a bit in the interim.
Filed under: graduate school, human-centered design
May 12, 2008 • 11:51 am 0
Have you ever considered, while watching … well, basically any commercial that’s marketed to women, the ridiculousness that is the “commercial lady dance?” She sways, she twirls, and if she’s really loving whatever crap the commercial is telling us we’re not good enough without, she throws her hands up in the air and really breaks out the smooth moves! It’s hilarious and cringe-inducing at the same time. In that spirit, Current TV and infoMania bring us an ode to the yogurt commercial.
via Feministing
Filed under: current events
April 23, 2008 • 10:40 pm 0
Hold on to your hats – I’ve got lots more cycling stuff to come! My group for a course called Experience Design is iterating on a prototype for a museum exhibit about what a true bike culture is like, and I thought I’d post one of our early, low-fidelity versions. We’re going to do the final one this weekend life-size, but this one gives a good idea of where we’re going with the project.
The video you will see in the background is used with the permission of David Hembrow, who has also shot lots of other fun first-person videos while cycling around Assen, the Netherlands, where he lives and operates some awesome-looking cycling tours. Thanks, David!
Once again, it’s important to note that this is a low-fidelity, early-version prototype. The goal of creating this one was to make sure it had the feeling we were going for before we spent significant time building something large-scale and fully developed.
Filed under: accessibility, eco, graduate school, human-centered design
April 18, 2008 • 9:50 pm 0
For an end-of-semester group project, I’ve been collecting online videos taken by people riding their bikes in different cities around the world, and I thought I’d share the fruits of my labor. Working on the project, by the by, has been super fun and rewarding — for Experience Design, my team and I have been charged with prototyping a universally accessible museum exhibit. I’ll post about details and the final result after we turn it in, but for now, I hope you enjoy seeing what it’s like to ride a bike in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Colombia.
Filed under: eco, graduate school, human-centered design
April 7, 2008 • 9:43 pm 0
Now that spring is here, I’m even more sad that I feel too scared to ride my bike around town. Maybe I’ll pluck up the courage to ride to the grocery store on the sidewalk one day soon. In the meantime, I can dream about living in stylish and bike-friendly Copenhagen:
Filed under: eco
February 23, 2008 • 7:08 pm 0
Once I realized that contemporary obstetrics is a system that is co-created by obstetricians and women, each of whom have much to gain from deconstructing organic childbirth and reconstructing it as technological production, I was forced to look again at the human-machine interaction that characterizes this reconstructed technobirth — at the strong symbiosis between the woman and the technology; at the way in which it removes the chaos and fear from women’s perceptions of birth and at its perfect expression of certain fundamentals of technocratic life. … I began to see the mutilation and prosthesis of technobirth as the fullest metaphoric expression of life in the technocracy, which I define as a society whose central organizing mythology constellates around a technological progress that will culminate in transcendence of all natural bounds, including both biological and planetary limitations.
Robbie Davis-Floyd, “From Technobirth to Cyborg Babies: Reflections on the Emergent Discourse of a Holistic Anthropologist.” Paper presented to the annual meeting, American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 1995.
I read this passage as it was quoted in the fourth chapter of my professor David Hakken’s book, Cyborgs@Cyberspace?: An Ethnographer Looks to the Future, and was totally creeped out. A week later, I’m still thinking about it and how it relates to other texts I’ve been reading lately about childbirth, particularly in the United States.
David Hakken uses the above passage to introduce a section of his book that argues, if I understand it correctly, that unlike Davis-Floyd’s account — in which she seems to become a cyborg on the operating table — we have always been cyborgs, from the time that human beings began to use tools. From page 72:
Even if the justice of such a boundary were demonstrated, the contrast would be between one form of technologically mediated humanity/cyborg and another, not, as Davis-Floyd presents it, a contrast between a purely biological human and a highly technologically mediated cyborg. … In sum, my Cyborg Anthropology stresses how humans have been quite “cyborgic” from early in the emergence of the species. Technology is so deeply implicated in human existence that it is a core aspect of our being.
The idea that we have always been cyborgs, regardless of whether the technology we incorporated was external or internal to what we think of as our individual bodies, makes sense to me, but it doesn’t make Davis-Floyd’s description any less eerie. And although she suggests in the passage that both doctors and mothers may be comforting themselves with the vision of cyborgian birth as a way to remove danger from the process, it is clear from her other writings that she, like me, sees flaws in this way of thinking:
The metaphor of the body-as-machine and the related image of the female body as a defective machine eventually formed the philosophical foundations of modern obstetrics. Wide cultural acceptance of these metaphors accompanied the demise of the midwife and the rise of the male-attended, mechanically manipulated birth. Obstetrics was thus enjoined by its own conceptual origins to develop tools and technologies for the manipulation and improvement of the inherently defective, and therefore anomalous and dangerous, process of birth.
Robbie E. Davis-Floyd. “The Rituals of American Hospital Birth.” Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, 8th ed., David McCurdy, ed., HarperCollins, New York, 1994, pp. 323-340.
This is not to suggest that obstetrics isn’t an important safeguard in high-risk birth situations, but several researchers make a powerful argument that the culturally accepted technological interventionist approach to low-risk childbirth in the U.S. is more dangerous for mothers and children than natural childbirth. For this reason, and despite my agreement with David Hakken’s assertion that our “cyborgization” (is that a word?) began long, long ago, reading Davis-Floyd’s description of the cyborgian birth experience gave me Mary Shelly-style heebie-jeebies.
Filed under: This required reading just Blew My Mind.
January 22, 2008 • 7:35 pm 0
In honor of the craziness today surrounding Microsoft’s opt-in IE8 rendering announcement, I bring you an opt-in/opt-out comparison list.
Things that should be opt-in:
Things that are better as opt-out:
Filed under: Uncategorized
January 13, 2008 • 10:51 am 0
Ellen Lupton is working on an expanded version of my favorite type book, Thinking With Type, to be released in 2010. Too bad 2010 is two whole years away, but at least I get to say “twenty-ten” in my head when I think about it, which still sounds very futuristic to me. Maybe I’ll travel to the book store on my hoverboard when the new version debuts.
Filed under: typography
January 12, 2008 • 2:49 pm 0
There’s nothing I like quite as much as a frilly dress movie, except perhaps a Jane Austin frilly dress movie. Thusly, for the next several Sundays, you will find me plopped down in front of a television somewhere watching The Complete Jane Austin, which, a good friend just reminded me, begins tomorrow night. Bless you, PBS!
Filed under: Uncategorized
December 21, 2007 • 11:04 am 0
As if I weren’t already in love with Take Away Shows — I just came across their videos for every song of Beirut’s newest album. Fantastique!
The video for Forks and Knives might be my favorite one:
Filed under: music
December 19, 2007 • 9:39 am 0
I found this snippet from Anil Dash while coincidentally cleaning out my Google Reader backlog today:
Adding features like comments from sources in a news story to Google News is an admirable attempt to bring unique value to aggregated news stories. But tasking a technology team with the duty to solicit and manage these comments ignores the fact that verifying, recording, and reporting a source is fundamentally an act of journalism. By trying to shoehorn a work of research into a primarily technological process, the news team faces the chance of fraud, abuse, error, or most likely, low participation and eventual abandonment.
An awareness that some types of information gathering require judgment and reasoning that’s not well-handled by even the most clever algorithms would help Google make its transition into being a company that creates original content.
Preach on, brother. This is why I love reading Anil’s stuff — he thinks like a journalist and a supergeek.
Filed under: editing, journalism
November 26, 2007 • 11:19 pm 0
I just got this pic in under the wire. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating — thank you, web standards!
Filed under: Uncategorized
November 15, 2007 • 10:45 am 0
For perspective on accessible web code from a blind web developer, check out Aaron Cannon’s recent North Temple post, “The Accessibility Cookbook: A Recipe for Disaster.” After all the talk about alt attribute text, it can still be easy to get wrong, and Aaron highlights the importance of finding a balance between being descriptive when the image adds meaning and knowing when to leave the attribute blank.
He also mentions Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by Andrew Kirkpatrick, et al., which I am slowly working my way through. One thing that I’ve already taken away from the book is that “skip navigation,” which has unfortunately become an industry standard, is not all that helpful to text-only users. In my redesign of the Mizzou Graduate School website, I opted for the recommended 〈a href="#main-content"〉Main content〈/a〉, which more directly tells people where the link will take them.
I removed North Temple from my RSS reader a little while ago because I found that many of the posts were not relevant to me, but luckily Cameron Moll (who works for the LDS church) pointed to Aaron’s post.
Filed under: accessibility
November 6, 2007 • 9:04 am 0
Savor some Stephin Merritt goodness to tide yourself over until the new Magnetic Fields album comes out this January by checking out “A Man of a Million Faces.” He wrote the song in two days as an experiment for the first installment of a new NPR series, Project Song.
My favorite part of the feature story is when Stephin names two separately recorded snare beats “Agnes” and “Billy” to help keep them straight for himself and the engineer. Maybe this is a common naming convention for song writers, but I like to imagine that only Stephin Merritt thinks to use the name Agnes.
Filed under: journalism, music
October 25, 2007 • 1:28 pm 0
The College Sustainability Report Card 2008, created by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, gives my alma mater and my current university C’s, which is sadly an improvement from last year. According to the executive summary (PDF), 31 percent of schools scored better.
Filed under: current events, graduate school
• 1:06 pm 0
Silly me — I should have known some smartypants had already come up with a solution to my problem. It’s not a Greasemonky script, but I can use Library Lookup bookmarklets courtesy of Jon Udell to see if my library has the book I’m looking at on Amazon.
FYI, you can grab bookmarklets for the following libraries from these pages:
Still not sure about Indianapolis Public Libraries or Indiana University, but it looks like I can build a custom bookmarklet pretty easily. They both use catalog systems made by SirsiDynix — I just have to find out which ones.
Filed under: Uncategorized
• 9:28 am 0
Must learn how to do this for the B-town Public Library and the IU Libraries:
As has been mentioned before, I’ve produced a Greasemonkey script to add notification to Amazon surfers if the currently displayed book is in the Cincinnati Public library.
(source: Mark Mascolino)
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 21, 2007 • 12:08 pm 0
As with list item bullets, it is traditional for opening quote marks to be placed in the left margin.
While avoiding a slowly encroaching abyss of unfinished homework, I finally got a chance to check out the slides from Jeff Croft’s presentation, “Typography: Beyond the Font,” (3MB PDF) from the 2007 Webmaster Jam Session, Dallas. For the most part, it was a great review of the principles I’ve learned over the past year, but I also picked up that new bit.
Filed under: typography
October 18, 2007 • 4:01 pm 0
The results of the ALA Web Design Survey 2007 are out, and I was especially excited to check out the fancy PDF report b/c I was a respondent.
Interesting (to me) notes:
Filed under: graduate school, information architecture
• 3:32 pm 0
Just downloaded In Rainbows and felt all empty inside when I popped open my media player and saw no cover art. A quick google search later, though, I see that Jon Hicks is all over it.
I picked Shaun Inman’s, but I also really liked the ones designed by Jon, Ben Darlow (comment #12), thetrew (#24), Chris Glass (#30), and another Jon (#97 & #98).
Filed under: music
October 1, 2007 • 8:51 am 0
I found myself doing a large amount of head-nodding while reading Jeff Croft’s recent short post about the difference between knowledge of web code and software and knowledge of design principles.
. . . I think employers often value knowledge of tools too much when it comes to hiring web designers. . . . So what is valuable? Judgement. Logic. Creativity. Ability to learn quickly. Ability to work under pressure. Experience. Empathy. Design theory. Design history. Opinions. Decisions. And so on.
I look back at some of the first sites I created after learning XHTML and CSS, and although I was proud of myself for tackling these new languages, I soon realized that just knowing them would not make a site’s type readable, the navigation comprehensible, or the layout well organized. It’s taken a whole lot longer begin to develop those more abstract skills than it did to browse a few books and websites to figure out the difference between an ⟨h1⟩ and a ⟨p⟩ element.
I would not call myself a member of the “any idiot can create well-formed code” camp because I believe that it does take experience and analytical thought to use the right code for a given situation. However, I agree with Jeff that a vast difference exists between interface-design knowledge and design-tool knowledge. In fact, since I’ve been studying design principles, I feel that I have a better understanding of how to use the tools in my kit.
For example, until about six months ago, my use of line-height and margin in CSS was somewhat arbitrary and based on little more than eyeballing. Now that I’ve investigated the vertical rhythm principle, these properties have more valuable meaning in my work.
I would add to Jeff’s list of potential employee desirables that a person should not only be a quick learner, but should also have the curiosity and drive for self-improvement that will lead them to reach beyond their base skill set, whether it be in design principles or code/software chops, to seek complimentary knowledge. Figuring out how to express that in a job posting might be tough, though.
Filed under: Uncategorized
September 23, 2007 • 5:07 pm 0
Welcome to a new tag in my notebook: “This required reading just Blew My Mind.” Here’s a little tip about grad school that you probably already know. In grad school, you read. A lot. And if you’re lucky, some of it might even Blow Your Mind. But then you have to go on and read something else that may or may not Blow Your Mind, and either way eventually you forget the preceding Mind Blowing reading. So I’m going to start jotting down some of these things so I don’t forget them.
Item no. 1 comes from “Plastic Brains, Hybrid Minds,” a chapter in Natural-born cyborgs by Andy Clark (as opposed to Andy Clarke, who, BTW, has also Blown My Mind in several passages of Transcending CSS). OK, so we’ve already got some awesome stuff here, including plastic brains and cyborgs, but it gets better.
Clark says that our conception of our bodies can extend beyond the actual matter that comprises them if we are “tricked” in the right way.
He lists several party tricks, devised by another researcher², that you can try to confirm this, including one where you, blindfolded, sit behind your friend in a chair with one index finger on her nose and one on your own nose. (You’re remembering that joke about picking your friends and picking your nose, aren’t you? You are so crass.) Another one of your friends, standing beside both of you, uses your index fingers to stroke and tap the noses of you and your friend with exactly the same rhythm.
After less than a minute of this synchronized nose-tapping, about half the subjects report a powerful illusion. It is as if their own noses now extended about two feet in front of them. . . . To make sense of this close and ongoing match between arm’s length tapping and end-of-nose sensation, the brain infers that your nose must now extend far enough for the arm’s-length tapping to be causing the feelings. So your nose must be about two feet long. (p. 60)
Whoa. That required reading just Blew My Mind. “To recap, human brains (and indeed those of many other animals) seem to support highly negotiable body images” (p. 62).
¹ This is what Ian said after I told him about the article. Who knew that a song he loves to hate so much would come in handy in a conversation about cognitive science?
²V.S. Ramachandran, professor and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego at the time the article was published
Filed under: This required reading just Blew My Mind., graduate school
• 10:41 am 0
I am proud to announce the unveiling of the new University of Missouri-Columbia Graduate School website today!
Unfortunately I will not be in Columbia to celebrate — I left to start a master’s in information science at Indiana University just before the final user testing phase of the project. Steven Richardson, my supportive supervisor at Mizzou, is the one copying all the new pages onto the server and taking care of the inevitable little fixes today. A hearty thanks to him, as well as to Janey Osterlind, our talented graduate assistant, for their contributions to the project. I would also like to thank the Mizzou central Web Communications team, who offered advice throughout this redesign process that has greatly improved the final result.
This project took me the better part of a year to complete, from initial research, to information architecture, to content editing, to hand-coding XHTML (including microformats), to visual design prototyping and CSS coding, conducting as much user testing along the way as possible. I truly believe that this version of the site will improve the user experience for applicants, students, staff, and faculty.
I hope to write more about particular details of the redesign in the future — I’ve learned so much working on it!
Filed under: MU Grad School redesign, information architecture
June 23, 2007 • 1:40 pm Comments Off
I’ve been waiting for an investigation like One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, by Rebecca Mead, to hit the mainstream since Ian introduced me to White Weddings a few years ago and I began to really think about what having a wedding would mean to me.
Despite the eye rolling brought on by Mead’s writing style, which includes what Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post calls “some of [the New Yorker]’s oldest pet tics, in particular an excessive use of the reportorial first-person singular,” she makes some truly chilling points about the expectations associated with getting married in the United States today.
Mead contrasts the real history of the American wedding with the wedding industry’s rewriting of it in a chapter called “Inventing the Traditionalesque.” She cites a 1939 study from the American Sociological Review called “The Cost of Weddings,” which reveals that a third of brides at the time did without an engagement ring and that the average cost of the wedding was the 2006 equivalent of $5,700 — a pittance in comparison to the $28,000 that the “American Wedding Survey’s” selectively chosen brides (mostly the readers of Condé Nast’s wedding magazines) are paying today on average.
Mead follows up this revelation with a hilarious, but also cringe-inducing, reminder of the wedding industry’s stake in our collective memory of nuptial tradition:
The traditions of not having an engagement ring or a bridal gown or a wedding reception or a honeymoon are those that the wedding industry has been more than happy to see whither away in the seventy years since the Timmons’s survey was conducted. The industry’s definition of a traditional bride is one who embraces the trappings of Bridezilla culture with enthusiasm, and her less enthusiastic counterpart is, understandably, a problem. When Vows magazine, a trade publication for wedding-dress retailers, featured an article on the “non-traditional bride,” it noted that such customers “don’t always make ‘good’ brides because they’re often uncomfortable starring in the role of ‘girl in the big white dress’” and warned retailers that the nontraditional bride was dangerously apt “to forget the wedding and prepare for the marriage.”
One Perfect Day, page 56
If that’s what it means to be nontraditional, sign me up.
Filed under: current events, journalism
June 10, 2007 • 12:35 pm 0
I recently completed one colossal step toward the information redesign of the Graduate School’s website—overhauling the way we list our academic programs.
I hope to write more about the background of this redesign, including details of the new information architecture I built, but for now I’m skipping ahead.
In the process of the creating the content inventory for our 500+ page site, I noticed a disturbing situation: three separate lists purporting to be the official “Fields of Study” index existed. And they were all different! Gulp.
Even among the first three items in each list, the inconsistency is apparent.
In several cases, a program would be called a different name on each list. For instance: is it “Biomedical Sciences,” “Veterinary Medicine – Biomedical Sciences,” or “Basic Biomedical Sciences”? Is it “Learning, Teaching and Curriculum,” or “Curriculum and Instruction”?
As far as I can tell, the three-list disaster was rooted in two major issues: a failure to see the three lists as connected content, and a focus on ease-of-use for the staff at the expense of usability for our audience.
Early in the process of conceptualizing a redesign of the Graduate School website’s information structure, I recognized the disconnect in the minds of our staff between the Graduate Catalog (fully online for several years now) and the rest of the site.
I will probably talk more about this in another post, but in this situation, as in many others, this mental separation had been the impetus for a repetition of information on the site—once for the Catalog entry, and at least one more time in an area of the site outside the Catalog. Rarely were all instances of these originally identical bits of content updated at the same time, and the result was a mess of conflicting information.
So that accounts for two lists (one inside the Catalog and one outside), but this problem was compounded by our need for a content management system that we didn’t have. We were putting a teeny tiny bandage on this gaping wound by housing a third list (which linked to admission requirements for each program) within a database that could be edited directly by our admissions supervisor.
I chose to work toward the creation of one master list—an official part of the Graduate Catalog—that would include all relevant information about each academic program, including a link to the program’s website, admission requirements, faculty, courses, degree requirements, and all the other details that were currently listed in the Graduate Catalog entries. As with the rest of the Catalog, any mid-year changes to the entries would be made using the <ins> and <del> elements, an idea borrowed from the way I had once seen amendments to the U.S. Constitution presented.
Luckily for us, we will be moving our site into the University’s new content management system after our redesign, allowing our admissions adviser to have access to our ever-changing admissions requirements for each program.
One of the first steps was to figure out how to make the index of programs easy to browse. Each degree or certificate program has an official, registered name—but we weren’t always using it, because sometimes the official name didn’t actually describe the program very well. Some of the academic programs that administered the degree and certificate programs were also engaging in some creative (but unofficial) renaming, which meant that prospective students would not always know the official names.
Luckily for me, I had recently learned quite a bit about the principles of indexing through a freelance job in which I indexed a book edited by one of my former professors. The professor had introduced me to the indexing instructions from the Chicago Manuel of Style, and I decided to use its guidelines for cross-listing entries as a starting point.
After I separated the official names of the degree and certificate programs into broad categories based on those used by U.S. News & World Report and alphabetized them within the categories, I added cross-listings anytime I thought prospective students might look under another name. For example (Note: The hyperlinks don’t actually go anywhere.):
- Curriculum and Instruction (M Ed, PhD, EdD, EdSp). See also Teaching Fellowship Program (M Ed)
- Learning, Teaching and Curriculum. See Curriculum and Instruction
- Mathematics Education emphasis (M Ed, PhD). See Curriculum & Instruction
- Music Education emphasis (MA, M Ed, EdSp, EdD, PhD). See Curriculum & Instruction
- Teaching Fellowship Program (M Ed). See also Curriculum & Instruction
Figuring out the index was easy compared to the task of combining the content attached to each of the three lists, which had never really been edited and formatted for the web before. After four weeks of solid work, I finally added all the necessary subheads, combined conflicting information about admissions requirements into accurate summaries, and managed to fix most of the other grammar and factual errors.
Next week I hope to conduct some user testing to make sure that my work has really resulted in a more usable framework for our poor students, who have been dealing with some confusing content for far too long.
Filed under: MU Grad School redesign, editing, information architecture
June 3, 2007 • 9:20 pm 0
I had a major stress fest a few weeks ago, induced by a late scholarship offer from a top-choice school that I had completely written off as too expensive. After a few days spent aimlessly freaking out, I finally started crunching numbers, based on the financial aid office’s estimated costs and a couple of online student debt calculators.
The best calculator I found was FinAid’s Student Loan Advisor, which uses your field of study to tailor your estimated starting salary and show whether the necessary repayments would be realistic for you.
Using the calculator, I realized that even with the scholarship and part-time work during school, I would be paying back something near $11,000 every year for 10 years — a financial risk that I am not willing to take. Fortunately, I have another perfectly good (and much cheaper) choice, so things aren’t so bad.
I’m a little bumbed that my final decision came down to a consideration of cash, but at the same time, there are so many unknowable variables in the graduate school search — will I really like the faculty? will I get along with my classmates? what will the work load be like? will I get enough out of the courses? how much better will my job prospects really be? — that it was comforting to have a cut-and-dry choice in the end.
Filed under: graduate school
May 31, 2007 • 9:55 pm 0
I just finished watching Charlie Rose’s interview with Al Gore at the 92nd Street Y in NYC, which reminded me of why Charlie Rose’s show is awesome — I loves me some rational dialogue. It’s free from the link (as opposed to $0.99 on Google video), but I’m not sure how long they’ll keep it up on the Y site.
Filed under: current events, journalism
May 24, 2007 • 8:27 pm 1
Last weekend I joined PaperBackSwap, a site where you can list books you’d be willing to send away to a loving home in exchange for credit toward a new (to you) book for yourself. I had heard about this before on my crush site Lifehacker, but it was the article about book-swapping websites in my newest issue of Bust that really got me thinking:
Who has room for a personal library in a studio apartment, or the deltoids to transport so much reading material with every change of address?
Swapping Lit, June/July issue
I’ll be moving in a few months, and although I’m not Thoreau-ish enough to get rid of the entire overflowing collection in my bookcase, I thought it was time to trade in a few things I’ll never read again instead of letting them sit on the shelves.
So far I’ve sent away four of the initial ten books I posted, which isn’t bad I think, considering that I just signed up. The problem now is that I’ve got four credits burning a hole in my Internet-pocket, and none of the books on my wish list are available. Ah well — this is a good exercise in patience, a virtue in short supply for me sometimes.
The verdict? PaperBackSwap seems pretty awesome if you want to get rid of some stuff and then have the used-bookstore experience of browsing for nothing in particular, but if you’re searching for a specific title, you might have to just pony up the cash at Amazon Marketplace or elsewhere.
Filed under: Uncategorized
May 15, 2007 • 9:23 pm 1
I am loving Les Concerts À Emporter (“Take-Away Shows”) by La Blogothèque, a site that asks bands who are touring through Paris to play an acoustic song or two in public settings — out on the street or, in the case of the Arcade Fire, in a freight elevator.
Other favorites of mine so far include Andrew Bird walking around Montmartre (in the video above) and the Guillemots on a stairway, also in Montmartre (at least I think — that entry is in French, and I can’t really read French anymore). The videos I’ve seen so far have an intimacy that leaves me feeling all warm and fuzzy. I will definitely be signing up for the podcasts.
Update at 10:38: And I just found one of Jens Lekmam playing one of Ian’s favorite songs (this one links to another site called Daily Motion, where La Blogothèque also hosts its videos).
Filed under: music
May 13, 2007 • 5:10 pm 0
If you’re a web professional and haven’t taken the survey over at A List Apart, hop on over and give it a go. It only took a few minutes for me to complete, including the diatribe about ill-fitting job titles that I wrote in the comments section. No word yet on when the results will be posted.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I Just Read This.
