SPLASH

SPLASH Project

2009-04-29T10:22:00.003+01:00

OK, so SPLASH has officially gone live on the front end of the Internal facing University of Sussex site!

See it here...

There are some new additions to the SPLASH site and the front page:

1. #sussex keyword feed from twitter
2. bus timetables
3. Term time information
4. Flickr / BBC News feed

The reason behind this was so that we could provide information to students and staff at the front end, saving them potentially in logging in just to find that bit of info.

We are very excited about the fact that SPLASH is front page on the internally facnig site and inevitably we expect to see a rise in traffic, i.e. visitors and unique hits.

So, what happens now for SPLASH? There are a number of Academic links established and the Web Team are looking to continue these relationships beyond this Academic Year, ready for 2009-2010.

For now though, I will be leaving as Project Developer on the SPLASH project and am moving over to the InQbate centre for a fixed term. You can continue to contact me via my Sussex email address OR find me on twitter.

It has been a pleasure to work on this project and I will be keeping an eye on SPLASH, you can guarantee - every day!

Small Group Activity

2009-03-31T10:14:00.003+01:00

So, what kind of things have been happening within SPLASH that illustrate small group activity or interaction?

There has been a small amount of this visible at the SPLASH database side, but of course, we cannot show that here because of privacy within SPLASH. The group activity was a blog by a member of staff in relation the following blog title:

Learning in the electronic age

A number of students returned comments onto the blog, which we at the SPLASH team could not see, but nevertheless, activity amongst this group was active.

PILOT groups

Activity has begun to emerge within the various academic departments involved with the Case Study, but again we cannot show these here due to the level of privacy chosen by the members of staff and students who have created discussions.

Emergence of Private Group Planning

Again, in reference to the SPLASH project, it is still at its early stages to fully illustrate what kind of small group activity is taking place, but the SPLASH Project Team believe that with the new University re-designs taking place of both the external and internally facing sites, SPLASH will increase its general user traffic and this may likely have an effect on interaction privately.

Also, with the progression of academic staff utilising SPLASH with their students at this early stage in time ready for the next academic year 09/10, it is likely we will see significant developments in the use of the system. It is also worth pointing out the current project Dr. Alana Lentin is involved in and how she wishes to involve SPLASH with this:

http://splash.sussex.ac.uk/blog/for/al229/2009/03/04/syd-for-soccul-project

SPLASH Project Walkthrough

An online Project walkthrough has been placed online for viewing. You can also download the swf flash file to view on your desktop:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/splash/methodology.php

User Statistics

Dissemination in relation to user statistics is also now online at the following project address:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/splash/userstatistics.php

The final project close meeting is scheduled for this afternoon at 12pm, whereby we officially conclude the SPLASH project and cover final issues and discuss future developments of the platform.

Will post shortly on the outcome of this.

SPLASH is now on twitter

2009-03-26T16:31:00.002Z

View the SPLASH twitter

SPLASH Usability report - December 2008

2009-03-26T13:10:00.005Z

As I haven't posted this report prior on the technical blog, it was time to do so. The Usability report has the results posted from usability sessions that were ran with 5 University of Sussex students form varying degree disciplines and ICT ability.

This post links in with Usability, PILOT Groups, Case Studies & more...

The summary of the usability testing here will cover:

1. Summary of key findings
2. Summary of results
3. Various user comments

The participants were as follows:

#1. Justyna Hodun, 1st year, History and Politics
#2. Natalie Gray, 1st year, Media
#3. Taras Zagibalov, DPhil English Literature,
#4. Hazel Mason, 3rd year, Psychology
#5. Amy Smith, 3rd year, Law

Each session ran for approximately one hour and the users tasks were recorded using screen recording software. Rather than reproduce everything in this blog, the main areas will be summarised and the full report will be available as a download in PDF format.

Users were given a preset amount of tasks to follow in using SPLASH, and users were also monitored during this process. You can view the exact type of tasks, by downloading the full Usability report at the end of this post. Following the tasks, the users were then given a list of questions to respond to that related to the key functions of SPLASH and general comments about the site.

1. Summary of key findings

1. Generally, the students found the site to be: ‘Useful’, ‘Easy to use’, ‘User friendly’ and ‘Targeted correctly’. It was surprising that a lot of the users had not heard of the site prior to their testing session and that they would inevitably use the site far more often because of its functionality and services. Impressions were generally positive and many ideas given for future development of the site.

2. A few users stated that by the time the site becomes popular, it may be their time to leave University. They however understood that this was necessary and probably a good thing for future undergraduates to get the best out of their online experience on campus and beyond.

3. All users gave clear points about the fact that the site had the ability to place lots of information in one space, on one page and not have to navigate to a large number of different sites. This was a clear favourite with all students. Students stated that the site did not have too much ‘text’, which they really appreciated. They communicated a sense of the site using far more visual than text – which was a very positive thing.

4. Throughout the test, users did experience a few small navigational confusions. Such as going to the latest blog entry, specifying widget and profile privacy settings, using the traditional search and particularly applying different settings to individual widgets. There were a number of occasions whereby the tester had to assist and/or direct the user to the correct location on the site.

5. All of the users found the adding of a profile image not very helpful and all expected to be able to add an image from their local machine, rather than an image off-site. Most users were unaware of external image sites such as Flickr or how to bring profile pictures across from Facebook.

6. A few of the users stated there was not a clear differentiation between your PRIVATE and PUBLIC space within the site. This relates to the hiding your profile within the settings area and the understanding of whether you are hiding your profile from outside the university, from other students and staff within the university etc. One user stated that within the settings area there should be a clear indication of how you could do this and maybe have specific options such as:

‘Hide from University’, ‘Hide from External’, ‘Hide Both’.

7. Questions were asked about the accessibility of the site for people who have dyslexia, impaired eyesight etc. Whether SPLASH would be able to cater for these users.

8. Users stated that the usefulness of being able to view news from the university, the badger, students union and CDEC was extremely useful. Users stated they would like to see advanced options of bringing in external RSS feeds easier than currently.

9. A number of users stated they would like to be able to separate their widgets within the dashboard by whole tabs. Thus allowing them to separate pages of widgets, giving each section a specified name and use.

10. Some users stated that the site needed more tooltips, particularly with the widget settings in order to know what each icon does. Users also specified the need for an external email widget.

2. Summary of Results

From the Summary of Findings, a priority list was compiled that focussed on the key issues that needed attention. These were as follows:

1. Examine the current navigation of Personal Blogs and Public blogs

2. Further targeted publicity of the site across the University, (such as an Open Day for SPLASH at Library Square)

3. Alter the current lists of widgets and allow for the seperation of pages of widgets at a time

4. Allow for Traditional Searching to become more prominent

5. Introduce more icons within the profile page for the user to add/amend/view profile pic, blog, courses etc

6. Add more revolving information on the homepage of SPLASH to show users reguarly some of the functions and services available

7. Import further open-source systems into SPLASH to enhance the current experience and to cater for areas such as calendars, scheduling, email, international weather and time and rich media

8. Investigate futher the relationship between Study Direct and SPLASH for students and staff

9. Further develop the layout and location of settings in relation to privacy from within the University and externally. This is particularly with regards to the profile of users.

-----------------------

3. Various user comments

Do you find the functions of the site helpful and easy to use, such as the messaging and blogging to specific contacts?

Yes. Would be more useful if you could put people in groups for presentations/discuss readings before seminars etc.

Yes. I was able to find and message people on my course easily. I was also able to message a whole group, which I found useful.

How do you feel about the site design and layout?

The site is easy to navigate around and the colours are welcoming.

Straightforward layout and design that is appealing and inviting.

Do you have anything to add about the new version of SPLASH and any of its functions?

I would like to see source integration with existing internet services, such as gmail, iCalendar etc. I would like to see the addition of International Time Zones in the widget areas to cater for more international students. Also the Weather widget needs to have more detail. The search is always a problem on the main University of Sussex website and therefore it would be good if SPLASH would improve to ensure that it makes up for this. I definitely prefer the traditional searching.

More to the site than I first realised. I believed the site would be more relevant to users that utilise sites such as Facebook. Found the bus widget really helpful and I will be more likely to use the site far more often in future. I like the idea of everything being on one page and all together.

----------------------

Overall, the usability tests that ran were successful and the feedback observed covered a good spread of opinion and experience that has helped inform the SPLASH project and particularly the on-going development of the platform.

To read the the full report that includes all comments and task-by-task responses, view and download the PDF file, (79kb)

JISC Report, SPLASH and the new Internal & External sites

2009-03-19T14:50:00.002Z

We are now at the final stages of the draft report for JISC, due in at the end of the month. To coincide with what has been happening with SPLASH, the new University internal and external sites are going to launch later in the year.

The most relevant issue is that SPLASH is being placed alongside the university's VLE: Study Direct and Sussex Direct, using tabs to go between the three. Alongside that, students and staff will have their own relevant areas, just as the existing site:

There will likely be some re-jigging of the SPLASH homepage, in order to bring relevant information to individuals, in terms of engaging users.

I will update soon about the final stages of the project.

It is also worth mentioning that I will be attending a JISC conference in Edinburgh next Tuesday to give a presentation on the topic: "Can technology help improve student motivation and retention?" I shall be giving a brief overview of SPLASH and how the blogs have proven a good foundation whereby students and staff raise issues and topics important to them.

Enhancing the student experience!

Bye for now,

Hesan

Jisc conference, last session

2009-03-03T15:45:00.003Z

Well, Amy and i are in the last session of the jisc event currently hearing a talk about e-assessments. Been a long day, but jam packed full of great ideas and particularly about other projects and their key findings and project difficulties. I will report on this tomorrow.

JISC approaches....

2009-02-20T15:51:00.002Z

Hi all,

It is fast approaching that time whereby we submit a final report to JISC and illustrate to them all of the things SPLASH has achieved, had difficulty within, expanded into and generally a big chat about the project.

It's a lot of work, but well worth it for the result at the end. I can't tell you enough of what has been happening since the end of January...But, before I do, I have a slight focus on some other things that need attention right now.

However, did you now know that Study Direct has a direct link via your profile of your SPLASH blog and profile? Courtesy of Paolo at the Study Direct team.

We feel that there could so much future development between the two, but are very much at the early stages of the potential. Post-JISC, there could be some very interesting ideas thrown around, particularly in light of Academic study and the notion of accessing documentation and files.

More to come...

The New Year update

2009-01-21T10:37:00.003Z

My apologies for not blogging earlier on the endeavours in SPLASH - but there has been a lot of elements to juggle since we have returned from the Christmas holidays..

Firstly, I want to talk about a new addition to v0.2 Beta of SPLASH. Working with the History department and Lucy Robinson, it came out at the end of last year that Lucy really wanted to look at the possibility of adding video and linking images directly within blogs.

I initially assumed that SPLASH was set up to handle this, because of the interface (TinyMCE). TinyMCE has icons for both linking to videos and images. After some testing at the end of 2008 with Lucy, it came apparent that this function was not working, following the test publishing of a blog. On my return in 2009 and having a chat with Andy, it was because this function had been disabled deliberately to counteract any possibility of potential hacking.

It was clear however, that the need for this function within blogging was paramount, if we were to going to offer mixed-media within a post. Being part of a case study within History, Social Work and other potential departments means that SPLASH needs to be able to offer other ways in which to visualise material, other than through widgets...

So, you find your video (in this case, youtube):

Adding the video into your SPLASH blog:

Finally, posting your blog:

With thanks to Andy and Dominic, it was great to see different media injected into the blog.

More to come.......;-)

Usability, PILOT Groups, Case Studies & more...

2008-12-18T15:02:00.003Z

Wow, it's already the end of December and things are hectic around here. The SPLASH project has had a new life injected into it with version 0.2 beta, better coded widgets (for load and cache purposes), messaging service (almost like threaded conversations) and a wide variety of user settings to control who sees your blogs/messages/profile and widgets...

Meanwhile, the dialogue opening up within SPLASH has started to explode quite rapidly over a very short period. Remember the earlier discussion on the Case Studies and some of the people who would be involved in the dissemination of SPLASH?

Here is the on-going work we are currently getting stuck into:

History department

Dr. Lucy Robinson is championing a very interesting way forward of how SPLASH could be used for her students within both the BA/MA courses in the department. January 2009 and the beginning of Semester 2 at the University sees the 'Video Documetary in Contemporary History' commencing for the MA students. Lucy is also looking to use the site as a means in which to get Year 1 students of the course involved.

Lucy sees using SPLASH as follows:

1. Blogs specific to courses/groups/communities, including the incorporating of pre-designed blog templates that are either brought into the site OR are readily available from within SPLASH/Study Direct

2. Messaging service to induce conversation & debate within contextual areas, (tracking progress of discussions)

3. Utilising the profile area to publicise latest discussions, current projects and any other work on-going that is relevant to students

Lucy wants a very clear strand within SPLASH for her students:

Students -------------->Year Group (within a course)
Students -------------->Personal Reflection

These 2 avenues will be sit side-by-side within SPLASH and be easily reachable by all users of the site. The idea is to incorporate the site into the constant tracking of students work, thoughts, ideas and suggestions throughout their relevant subjects. Lucy uses Study Direct vastly for her documentation and week-by-week schedule, which is extremely valuable for all of her students. I have seen first hand how she has adopted Study direct to act as a one stop shop, whereby relevant documents, lecture notes and guidance notes on coursework can be obtained.

Within this, Lucy wants to adopt the power of SPLASH v0.2 in being able to publish information to specific groups, whether it be regarding course updates, interesting research material or commencing discussion around critical theory. This essentially will take SPLASH into a very different arena than what it was originally intended for and am I therefore really excited to see where this could take us in the coming months, particularly directly after the upcoming holidays...

Research Department

So, the Research department contacted us a little while back and came to us with this problem:

"Currently, our Research students are unable to search for subjects that others are researching, in order for individuals (DPhil students) to come together and converse on their respective areas, possibly to share resources and act as a way in which to build our Research community".

We knew that SPLASH could help in this way. How?

PROFILES!

All Research students are able to use SPLASH as they are affiliated with the University and therefore can go straight into building their profile and associate their presence with 'tags'. The tags would list all of their Research specialisms and areas of interest, that become instantly searchable through 'User tags' within the Search area on the site.

We are working with Gail Barrett and Kathleen Fincham to facilitate workshops from January 2009 for both the Research Students and Staff to show them how to use SPLASH to create their presence and also how to interact with the functions on the site to blog, message and set up their individual profiles.

-----------------------------

The facilitation of a 'Showcase' event on the 20th January, 2009 at the InQbate creativity zone has been discussed with Diane Brewster, (facilitator of the space) in inviting Product Design students to see how the SPLASH site works and continue the 2nd part of dissemination that occured earlier this year in Summer.

Recently, the InQbate centre hosted a 3 day event: 'The Big picture' that has been initially documentated by means of a blog on the SPLASH site, which I will talk about later this week here in the tech blog...

Social Work department and Cath Holmstrom are also on board in rolling out some interactivity with her Year 1 students and this will become more apparant from January 2009 also. This is predominantly in relation to her students who spend a considerable amount of time off-campus, either as part-time or for students who are working within their placements.

Usability Tests

The last 2 weeks also saw us working in unison with CDEC in order to bring together five different students from different academic disciplines for usability tests on v0.2 beta. Screen recording software was used to document their sue of the site and heavy transcription of their questions, thoughts, opinions and responses to the site was recorded for later dissemintation. These results will be published online later in a detailed breakdown...

Initial viewing of the results shows SPLASH to have been accepted well, both in terms of intuitive interface as well as access to information. I'm very excited about that and how JISC will react to what we have to show them.

Alongside this, a task-based questionnaire was put together for students who are based predominantly off-campus. This questionnaire is open until the end of January 2009 and will add to the usability results for the site. Further details on this due in a later blog.

It's all go and a lot of paperwork heaps to be filed early next year. Parallel projects are all running alongside the dissemination of the site, but we hope to package all of the case studies and results in a manageable form for viewing by all next year..

Right, back to my emails...

SPLASH v0.2 test results - 2nd December, 2008

2008-12-03T09:43:00.004Z

Right then. SPLASH test results from yesterday were a many. A few bugs and lots of comments about how the system worked, in good and bad ways. All being constructive!

Setup of the machines were as follows:

PC / XP Professional / Firefox 3.0.1 & Internet Explorer 7+

Location: ARTS C/ Room: C.169

The breakdown of users who attended were:

1) Dan H - Library
2) Cath M – Library
3) Adrian H – Library
4) Chris K – Library
5) Hesan Y – Web Team

I decided to run through the site thoroughly whilst the users attended the location, so that I could put it through it's paces. I felt that because I had spent a lot more time on the development server than the users attending, it was paramount for me to run riot on the site. More testing is always better than less.

Lack of Speed

Yesterday was faced with a great deal of speed issues on the entire splashdev site, that was also experienced across the LIVE SPLASH site. Concern was raised of this to IT Services at the University during the course of the day and was eventually solved this morning. The issues surrounded one of the clusters, namely: "Mally". SPLASH is being housed on this cluster and the servers required a reboot in order to flush, what is possibly a memory (virtual) issue.

Needless to say, during the testing yesterday, all users had to accept a significant speed reduction when navigating around the site.

User responses

There were a great deal of responses in relation to a lot of areas of the site. Rather than list under each individual, it is far more advantageous for us to consider each area of SPLASH and look at the responses and problems that occurred:

Messaging

“Can’t send a message to yourself in the messaging system”, (an error by the webteam in believing that you could send a message to yourself, this is actually locked).

“In Messages and your message list, I noticed the bright green ‘+’ symbol and when I placed my mouse over it to expand this, the profile picture appeared of the person who sent me the message. When I did this, I expected that the thread/conversation(s) would expand and I would actually see a summary of all of the conversations, rather than an image. I believe that it would be more intuitive to use that function as a way to see summaries of all of the conversations, rather than just for an image”.

“How do I know if I have received a message?”

“When sending a message through the service, placing hyperlinks in the message doesn’t show up as a hyperlink – i.e. the messages are only plain text. Can this be changed?”

“Messages were cool”

“I already had a few messages sent to me. I wanted to reply, but wasn't sure how. Clicked on subject line, and then it was easy!”

“Pasted a URL in to a message, was hoping it would automatically turn in to a link, so the people I sent it to did not have to copy and paste it in to browser”.

“Cool, while typing this, it has just refreshed screen with a notification, useful. (perhaps it could email my chosen email address when I am off-line, perhaps it already does, need to check this out)”.

“In ‘Messages’ area, when clicking into your list of messages, the images of the person whom you have received a message from, (profile picture), takes a prolonged amount of time to load. Waiting for it to load, just shows a slim black thin bar”.

“Can’t add another contact to an already opened conversation in messages”.

“Some confusion over replying to a message in a thread. Could it not read ‘Reply to on-going thread or conversation instead?”

SPLASH Blog

“Couldn’t see the blog”. Initially, Dan could not see the blog that was created by Hesan Yousif and made viewable just to Dan via the ‘Contact Group’ privacy function

“Viewing a blog via a contact is only viewable via >profile>read blog. Is there another way this can be done to make it more intuitive for the user, i.e. quicker?”

“Initially, blog did not write to homepage, but was resolved later. (Privacy>Anyone blog)”

“When clicking the ‘Blog’ link, the options for creating a new blog or search a blog appear to the far right of the page, rather than to the left”.

“When commenting on a blog, if you are the person who has wrote the blog, the comment box when displayed shows your name in GREY on a BLACK background, making the username invisible to the eye”.

“When writing a blog to a specific contact group that you have set up, (think in terms of a tutor), the newly created blog does not have notification to emails, nor is it a setting within the settings area. This definitely needs adding I think”.

Contacts

“How do I add a contact?” It was not clear whether you add a contact via the message area, or via the search>traditional searching>user name area.

“I found it not so easy to find contacts”.

“Can’t add a contact easily. How do I do that?”

“Created a contact group ok”.

“Finding a contact is not easy. In the traditional search area and under ‘user name’, if you put in the first name of someone such as: ‘Dan’, then the search returns many results, and you have to trawl through many, unsure of whether you have got the right person. Also, if you put just a surname, nothing is returned because SPLASH only uses first names. If you put a first and last name, nothing at all comes back again. This serves as a problem when trying to find friends and I found it extremely frustrating to use!”

“Adding a contact under ‘Messages’ worked well, but it does not give you the option to add them as a contact. If this was available, issues of finding and adding a contact would not exist through the searching function”.

“Can’t add another contact to an already opened conversation in messages”.

Widgets

Dan commented on how good the Bus widget is. However, he made a comment that he would like to view the Bus timetable via Bus number, rather than you choosing a location. For instance, choosing bus number 25C would open a list of locations of where the 25C stops. He stated this would help him and others in understanding WHERE he would be able to catch this bus. Possibly adding a visual map of this would be even better.
[edited: This has actually already been done - confirmed with Developer 'X'!]
“I am slightly confused on the widget settings and how I can change them. Where do I do that?”

“There are typographic errors on the bus timetable widget description”.

“Response time of deleting a widget seemed long”.

“Moved widgets around the page on the dashboard, caused the widget not to be moved and eventually crashed the page, with a white background coming up and the word ‘Loading’ at the top left hand corner”.

Settings

“On the settings page, slightly confusing as there are too many boxes around that get in the way. For instance, when you click ‘Notifications’, then notifications is highlighted and on the right hand side, the title is also ‘Notifications’. Is there any way in which we can minimise the repeating of titles there?”

“Set search settings to 'traditional search' not fully sure what it means but when searching want to search as broad as possible”.

“Under ‘Search’, the ‘Traditional Searching’ link shifts to the next line below and to the far left of the page. “When hovering over the link: ‘Search Blog Tags”, the ‘Traditional Searching’ link appears on the right hand side of the page”.

“Email notifications on each occasion someone responds to you in the same thread do not occur more than 2 times. I noticed in my email account were only 1 or 2 notifications for the same thread”.

Conclusions & Recommendations

The users had lots to say about what they would like to see in this version of SPLASH in the future, some of which were:

1. The layout is clear and easy to understand

2. Messaging and blogging functions now much more helpful

3. The Dashboard area could get full of widgets and then take a long time to load or scan through. It would be useful to have additional tab(s) for widgets I only use occasionally for a group of widgets such as RSS feeds from blogs

4. Can hyperlinks be set to automatic in the settings area, so that each time I click a hyperlink, it will take me to a new tab or page in my browser, rather than in the same browser.

5. It can take a long time to navigate back to SPLASH

6. Will I be able to bring in flash moving image?

7. I would like to see all widget titles become dynamic, depending on what you type in the preference box. At the moment, the flickr and youtube ones are fixed, can we change that because I may bring in multiple flickr/youtube widgets

8. I have a lot of widgets in my dashboard, and noticed that as I am adding more widgets; my page is increasingly getting longer, in terms of scrolling more and more down the page. I currently use a service that allows me to group my widgets, rather than have them all displayed at once. It would be good if SPLASH has this functionality, so that I wouldn’t have to constantly scroll down the page and have all of my widgets displayed

9. New features are useful and seem easy to use

10. Found that the widgets (newly installed ones) did take a little while to load up, but after that seemed to be the same as other widgets

In discussion with the testers, some people felt that areas of the site were not as intuitive as they could of been, in terms of adding contacts and finding a contact. There was also some difficulty in initially understanding how the message system worked - many people believed it to be standard email, rather than based on the notion of conversations within a thread.

General consensus across the user base however was that the site had increased its functionality distinctively in this version and they were clear of the benefits that the new settings and messaging could bring. The testing session was clearly let down by the fact that speed was of a major problem. This is now believed to have been due to issues on the Mally cluster, rather than any potential problems with the code within SPLASH.

I knew I was aware of this case, because days and weeks prior to playing around with the Development server, all was well in terms of response times. To give you an example of how things are running now, (Development Server and LIVE site for SPLASH):

Yesterday: Average of 30 requests each time:
3.8s / 4.8s / 6.1s

Today: Average of 30 requests:
320ms

I think it is fair to say that we are looking a lot better at this point, than we did yesterday afternoon, hence the reason why most of our Test users were using the site for at least an hour.

What next? Usability testing - and lots of it. Meanwhile, questionnaires being prepared with tasking for off-campus students. Check previous blogs at the end of November for information on this.

SPLASH Beta v2 Testing session

2008-11-27T14:50:00.003Z

I have organised a SPLASH testing session for Beta v2 next week in order to fully test the new functionality of the site and ensure that there are no areas left untouched.

Staff from IT Services and the Web Team will be dropping into a testing session from between 11:00 - 13:00 hours at the ARTS C building, Room: C169.

This should ensure that we verify any major problems, (if there are any) before it is rolled out University wide.

Excited! Yes I am.

SPLASH Pilot Groups

2008-11-20T13:00:00.002Z

As promised, I have an update for you regarding our Pilot Groups and how we are going to document this for the Case Studies and Usability Testing for SPLASH. This has been a particular challenge because of turnaround of staff, a few societies disbanding and generally a busy first term for a lot of people. I have planned to deal with a good cross-section of Staff and Students from the University.

Case Studies

Case Studies will be formed from these departments:

Social Work
International Students (studying abroad)
Part-time/Mature Students
Product Design
History
CDEC
Student Union Societies (still awaiting response via the Student Union)

My plan is also to inject a form of questionnaire within the Usability testing tasks that will give us more information about specific areas within SPLASH such as suggestions, ideas and things that were good/bad, need thinking about for the future etc.

Within these networks, I will also coordinate Usability testing, following on from previous testing on this area that was carried out earlier in the year.

Initially, I was planning to create an entirely new Usability task sheet and also prepare a brand new questionnaire. Thinking about it, it would however make entirely more sense to build upon the previously created Task sheets created for earlier Usability testing carried out earlier this year. Of course, elements will be added and taken away to make the task sheets more applicable to the current version of SPLASH.

Any testing and Usability will be carried out until after Beta v0.2 is released, so that it at least incorporates the new functions of the site and so that we may test out the new aspects of the site accordingly. Interestingly, my favourite balded head chap and all round expert on the web, Jakob Nielsen suggested only ever using 5 people per Usability testing session. His arguments for that are solid and I agree.

Have a look here to see what I am referring to.

Findings from both the Case Studies and Usability testing will be placed on the blog, so that we can see what the outcomes were.

Departmental Uses of SPLASH

At the moment, there has been extensive discussion regarding numerous departments using SPLASH for their own areas. Some of the departments that we are seeing for the Case Studies will be in discussion about how SPLASH could be used for their purposes.

This is an exciting area that could open some interesting ideas.

SPLASH Beta v2 and update

2008-11-17T14:13:00.003Z

Greetings followers of SPLASH. Long time no speak on here, right? It is right. Combination of busy happenings and me being in a world of illness. Right, we are getting to the very important stages of releasing a Beta v2 soon and it will be filled with lots of new features and functionality, having been informed by Staff and Students on what they would like to see happening within SPLASH.

We have mentioned many of these requests earlier on, some of which were:

1) Ability for Tutors to blog only to relevant students (within specific groups)
2) Messaging service (for contacts on your contact list)
3) Ability to upload your own profile image
4) Search functionality to be changed/amended
5) Pre-loading widgets (decreases load time significantly on dashboard and profile)

These are just some of the new features being added into SPLASH that will be out in the new version. We will look into the technical aspects of how these new functions work with the original version and how they have come to fruition.

PILOT Groups

We are moving on with these, slowly, but surely... Final and compiled lists of who we are working with and under what contexts will be published later on. Some departments have approached us to utilise SPLASH for their own needs - which is very exciting stuff. More information on this later.

As always, I aim to update you all on the project happenings minute by minute. Keep watching this space for a lot more content shortly.

Interim comments by student users of SPLASH

2008-10-16T15:20:00.004+01:00

OK, so we are not quite at the point of the PILOT groups, their responses, usability and feedback. However, as obviously because SPLASH is already live and it is post Fresher's Fair and we are getting more users interacting with the site, there has been plenty of emails and blogs regarding SPLASH.

So, let's take a little peek at what we have had so far on the site:

The blog states:

Clearly more practice needed... my first post it doesn't seem to have got published. Not sure where I went wrong. Anyway - I'll try again.

It will be interesting to see how well this is taken up by students - they seem very wedded to facebook to me - last term I ran a computer based psychology experiment in a room with 50 networked computers. In the 3 minute break between blocks of trials, I stood at the back of the room and saw 50 facebook homescreens and lots of frantic typing...

Comments:

Sam,

Interesting. However, SPLASH is not meant to replace popular sites such as Facebook, Digg, Bebo etc..SPLASH is meant to be a place whereby you login, get your latest updates on your course, timetable, uni news etc - but at the same time gives you the opportunity to bring across your social presence from the external sites and keep an eye on it over here...

It's early days. SPLASH is in beta and it's all about being informed by users ;-)
By Hesan Yousif on Thursday, September 25, 2008

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I have to say I like a lot of the features of this SPLASH thing.

I think the dashboard is the best feature - but can/will you be able to add widgets that aren't on the list? Facebook is endemic now, but there's no room for this kind of thing. The ease of commenting on, and prominence of blogs is a welcome addition too.

Perhaps a forum would work well?
By Daniel Wadeson on Thursday, September 25, 2008

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Daniel,

Well, at the moment, you can personalise your widget by bringing across your own RSS feed from another source. You can do it by selecting 'RSS Feed' from the widget drop down list and then going into its preferences and adding your RSS feed URL.

SPLASH is constantly having things added to it and is being made more functional by its users all the time.

Don't forget to find us at Freshers Fair - free jam giveaway!!! Not only that, but a guestbook to share your comments/ideas and a few guys around to have a chinwag with...

By Hesan Yousif on Thursday, September 25, 2008

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Another interesting post was from a student whose initial impression of SPLASH was not impressive. See what he says:

The blog states:

I mean really, another social network. Is this really gonna do anything useful that facebook cant already do? Would it not have been better to spend the resources improving the awful awful sussex webmail?
Comments

Jason.

Comments:

It's good that you feel comfortable expressing your feelings re: SPLASH and your sentiments re: sussex webmail. Just a few thoughts though:

SPLASH is not meant to be 'Just another social network' nor a platform to go up against Facebook, Bebo or MySpace. Rather, SPLASH is meant to act as a 'One-stop shop' internally on the Sussex campus whereby we can achieve much more of a 'community-based' sense and at the same time pull information sources that you already use into the same space.

This has its advantages in that you are able to view local university news, jobs and your coursework/timetabling in one location, whilst being able to keep an eye on your external accounts.

Finally, the reason why we were able to implement the SPLASH site was due to funding received from the JISC. For information all about it and how much we got - pop along to the SPLASH project website. As you'll be aware, this is a beta version of the SPLASH site, and we welcome all feedback so that we can develop the system further - you can post any thoughts to our Get Satisfaction site.

Stay happy and with a smile I hope !
By Hesan Yousif on Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Thanks for the reply, I've had a bit more of a play with it now and i can see how it could be able to help, the whole idea of being able to find people on your courses (automatically) is a nice feature, and something that couldnt be done on an external site easily.

In terms of a possible improvement, making a splash application on facebook, and use the api to pull your information on your profile out of that to make it easier to create a profile. And maybe make it send notifications / post things on your news feed etc.

Lets hope enough people sign up to this to make it a useful tool!

p.s. loving the last.fm love on the homepage
By Jason Fry on Sunday, October 5, 2008

Jason,

Thanks for the reply. I'm glad you can see the primary uses of splash and what the future may hold for its development. The facebook feature you mention is already possible, albeit in a scaled down manner.

Just add the facebook widget under your dashboard area and that will pull in your latest updates. your current status and friends etc.

The last.fm onthe frontpage we all thought in the team would be a real worthwhile feature - always nice to see what our sussex colleagues are al listening to!

I'll feed this comment into my team here and they will surely appreciate the time you have taken to get to know the site better.

Hope your course starts well ;-)

H
By Hesan Yousif on Monday, October 6, 2008

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Finally, one user who was looking forward to their final year of academic study and has high hopes for SPLASH and where it would maybe take us:

The Blog says:

So, as I sit here on the cusp of my final year at Sussex, lemon in hand (free bus travel, see) - NB lemon is not actually in hand, just nearby in case of emergencies, otherwise typing would be too difficult. What was I saying? Oh yes, 3rd year. I do feel a little wierd and old with all the freshers about, and although I'm only (about to be) 22, I feel like I need to start thinking about "the rest of my life." Hopefully I have a prospective job lined up, received a call from the Shell Step program with a possible job in the area that I'm looking for (surely anything beats working at sainsbury's?). I would also like to congratulate the splash team not only for coming up with a great idea for student interaction, but to actually get it on the front page of Sussex Direct, trust me after working with the PAL scheme last year I can tell you that is no easy task. Keep up the good work guys, I'm looking forward to seeing how SPLASH grows over the next year.

Right I'm off to Uni to remember what I learnt last year.

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An interesting array of comments from very different users, coming from very different perspectives in the use and application of SPLASH. I am very excited to look at these in further depth. At the moment though, they give some indication of the initial feel on campus. There are plenty more comments that have been fielded into our helpdesk area for the Web Team that I have collated and will translate into some better method in which to present it.

A lot of things going on, I'm beginning to get hidden underneath mounds of paperwork, emails and numerous screens. I might get some Jam out now...

Web Team ideas generation

2008-10-14T12:00:00.000+01:00

Well, last Friday, me and some of the guys got thoughts to noticeboard regarding SPLASH, external links and general future development ideas. The Web Team already use a Wiki to input ideas and issues that SPLASH has, but I wanted to try to look at the bigger picture. Jack, myself and Developer 'X' hooked up for a good hour in generating some ideas..

I needed some input to help inform my writings about how the University of Sussex has a presence on the most-used external sites and look at the effect of this in the larger Web 2.0 picture alongside SPLASH. Trying to think 'out of the box' and stand back from the daily SPLASH use is not an easy task, but I think we are getting there.

We also questioned 'Social Networking' and what 'Social Media' meant to all of us. Times are constantly changing and already individuals are turning 'off' the notion of spending a lot of their time on the big social networking sites. SPLASH is got to be ahead of that wave and I am thinking of constant methods to inject new perspectives...

Anyhow, I want to show you our efforts. Photosynth is a Microsoft Live Labs creation which I absolutely adore. I uploaded a collection of images, (at least 10) and it finds the exact location of what images are where and collates them together in the correct format - I love that! Now, you may need to have Photosynth installed, so if you can't see the bottom iframe, visit HERE

Guide to using Photosynth:
Grid View>View the individual images
+/->Zoom in or out
<| or |> >View previous or next image
> >Pressing play shows the entire board as a slideshow

You can also just use your mousewheel to zoom in and out and drag left and right using the left mouse button as you would do in google maps.

View the project background on Photosynth here also.

JISC de-brief

2008-10-10T16:14:00.000+01:00

Well, my first JISC conference. Not bad at all. Aston University was an interesting campus, rather business-like according to Tony, (funny, as when we returned, someone at Sussex stated that they are top in their field for business). The conference centre we attended had a nice lake directly outside the front. Not only that, but combined with the fact that it was a sunny day, it worked out quite well.

The morning session started off talking about collaborative projects between JISC and the TLRP (TEL) which stands for 'Technology Enhanced Learning Overview'. The project received a great deal of funding and had at least 8 projects taking place. All good stuff.

I'm not going to put too much stuff up on here about the conference, other than there was a few other projects being run by other institutions that caught my attention. One being Southampton University and their 'Mobile PDP' within the nursing department; another being the University of Bournemouth and again a digitised PDP solution for links to employers on students graduating...

There is plenty of information about these areas on the JISC website and if your interested, pop along to the JISC here

Meanwhile, there are lots to bring you up to date on. Some of which are:

1) Update on PILOT groups
2) Tony's Open Session responses
3) Further functionality to SPLASH
4) Campus going's-on that SPLASH has been involved in
5) My endeavors in the long-term applications of SPLASH with external sites and mashups extended.

Lot's more to come. Meanwhile, the team has had a massive 'skill-cloud' discussion today - and I'm off to continue more of it before the weekend begins...More on that too soon.

JISC e-learning Programme Meeting 8th October

2008-10-07T11:23:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow, Tony and I are off to a JISC organised conference at Aston University, Birmingham. It's a whole day event that will include lots of parallel discussions and areas sessions on what we here with SPLASH have done and what we continue to do, alongside meeting people who are also involved with e-learning projects.

I'm looking forward to the event, as it my first JISC related conference. I was thinking of documenting the event. I might chat to Tony about the idea of that.

I am interested to see what other Universities are doing on this subject and it will help to inform me of new ideas, development and what the future holds for potentially new projects.

Check out the programme here

target="blank" or target="new"?

2008-10-07T10:39:00.000+01:00

The Web Team and I have been chatting a lot recently about opening new windows when clicking on a hyper link within SPLASH. It all started off with Developer 'X'. Developer X started a conversation with Tony stating that opening new windows when clicking on a hyper link was a good thing and it allowed for the user to keep the new site they are visiting separate from the main site that they were viewing, namely SPLASH.

I must admit, I agreed also. In my 10 years+ of navigating sites, designing for the web, meeting design practitioners and attending conferences, I had always felt that the target="blank" gave me the opportunity to keep the new hyper link site as a separate entity, allowing for me to keep a presence on the main site I was viewing. It is convenient, easy and allows me to navigate like mad around the web.

However, I forgot about the W3C standards and Mr Jakob Nielsen. They had always iterated that this type of design should not take place as it was never good accessibility. Tony agreed also and suggested that designing for the web is about allowing users who do not have much experience or awareness, to not get confused and have a seamless experience.

Developer 'X' stated:

I thought I could see both sides of the argument. I actually favour target="_blank" over using JavaScript, although it isn't valid in the DTD we use (XHTML 1.0 Strict), but is valid in the more relaxed version (Transitional).

He then goes onto say:

This has been deemed 'unusable' - users can't be expected to understand the concept of 'windows' even when using a windowing Operating System, or if glancing away from the screen for the brief moment the new window opens, they shouldn't need to expend the effort taken to direct the eyes to the taskbar to see that a new window has
opened when their 'back' button no longer works - no, it's rightly assumed this user will hammer at the 'back' button growing ever-more distressed, until they close the site in anger (and we ignore the fact that, at this point, they'd then see their content). This is the behaviour we must encourage!

However, I then noticed something that Developer 'X' stated: That validation would probably break when we were to pull in other information sources and links through our widgets into SPLASH. This is a very valid point. We cannot control what is happening outside of SPLASH and in fact the primary function of SPLASH is for you to be able to pool in information from the outside and get what you need in one place.

We are using DTD Strict - when if we were to use DTD Transitional, we could get away with the ability to open hyper links in new windows. TinyMCE uses the target attribute for links, so it could work in that way, Developer 'X' reiterates.

Title tags and Jakob Nielsen

Tony found this great article and it warns of opening links in a new window and gives the reasons against. It also talks about ways in which we could use this system whilst warning the user with title tags. If you warn the user by using text notifications. This can vastly increase usability for visually impaired users and also be picked up by screen readers.

I must admit, I like this idea and it seems to enforce accessibility and be acceptable for a variety of users. You give the warning of a new window, you tell the user about the new window and you give them the new window. Telling the user what you have done and they follow it works for me.

Roberts talk discusses this well in the form of a designer to client in designing for the web. It all comes back to your code being strict or transitional and whether you are designing with accessibility in mind. It is about a balance act between writing good code and accessibility and considering your end user.

I would suggest that considering the end user is paramount for SPLASH, but we should also consider that university students in the current climate are probably already coming to the university with good I.T. and general technology skills. However, there is always a percentage whereby that may not be necessarily the case and it is this specific percentage of people (staff included) whereby we have to promote good design, ease of use and acceptable browsing.

An interesting debate, and one in which it will likely continue into the further development of SPLASH. As I mentioned to Tony earlier, opening new windows can occur in tab forms these days across most browsers that we use on both the MAC and PC platform. Opening a new window into a tab, rather than a brand new browser window could alleviate some of the confusion and accessibility issue, but is it enough?

Freshers Fair and the SPLASH stand

2008-10-03T13:28:00.000+01:00

We had a stand right next to the SU courtyard, directly outside of the CDEC building on Wednesday 1st October, 2008. Me amongst the Web Team guys set the stall up with information about SPLASH and we had an interesting PR stunt:

We gave away free JAM!
Yes, the choices were between Blackcurrant or Raspberry; all of which had the SPLASH name and URL stuck on the side. We brought in 1200 mini jams from a local farm in Sussex and Tony thought of the idea being a little bit different to the standard A6 postcard, keyring or flyer.

It worked incredibly well. All the jam went into the pockets and bags of new and returning students at the University eager to use their new jam for those early morning starts, where toast is on the main agenda. Just as important, we all talked to students about what SPLASH is, how it works and the way in which it will enhance their experience at Sussex.

There were some very interesting comments and statements along the way which gave the team food for thought:

1) Oh is SPLASH like just another 'Facebook' site for uni students?
2) Is this the new site I've heard about where you can socially network?
3) I don't like social networking, is that what SPLASH is all about?
4) What would I use SPLASH for?
5) I love the idea of SPLASH. It's about time we had something like this in the University.
6) What's the maximum number of widgets I can add in the site?
7) Are you the Jam Society?
8) Why free jam? Did you make this jam yourself?
9) How do I log into SPLASH? What details do I use?
10) Is SPLASH going to replace Study Direct?
11) Is SPLASH going to be integrated into other University systems?
12) I'll definately remember SPLASH everytime I see or use my jam.

These comments will be fed into the current development of the site and help to inform the sites functionality and content. Not forgetting that whilst this is continuing I am researching into ideas about SPLASH's long-term role within the University of Sussex's network and how it can be used in different ways with web 2.0 systems within an educational context. I will publish further details on that shortly.

Juxtapositioned alongside this was the team's constant call outs: 'Free Jam!' and 'Jam for Free!' It worked....;-)

The Freshers Fair was a very important PR exercise in drumming up awareness of SPLASH and its function within student education here at the University. The stand was perfectly located in a thoroughfare whereby all students entering and leaving the area had to walk past our stand.

Tony got involved at the stand too after running a SPLASH open session, whereby he illustrated the site to staff and how they could adopt the system for their students and departments. We will talk about the Open Session in another dedicated post.

It was an active day for SPLASH and it's first experience with the new undergraduate students that received a warm welcome.

You can take a look below at some of the day in two videos that I edited in iMovie from video filmed by Jack and Tony:

We hope to see SPLASH become further populated with content and more and more students adjusting their personal preferences over the course of the coming weeks.

SPLASH Template competition

2008-09-19T10:24:00.000+01:00

So, it is time for you all to get with the program and start designing templates for the SPLASH site and your chance to win £40 worth of book tokens and have your template design made into a live design used by students and staff across the University!

Have a read and get started! Visit the SPLASH site

Take a peek at the images below giving you further information followed by images of all of the templates that SPLASH is currently using:

SPLASH TEMPLATE COMPETITION GUIDELINES:

Ok! So, you would like to have a go at creating a new SPLASH template?

Thinking that it might be a little difficult? No it isn’t! The SPLASH template has numerous elements on the page that involves a lot of XHTML, CSS, PHP and mashup services. However, all YOU need to do is create a FLAT image following the exact layout of the SPLASH site... This guide will take you through some of the things you need to be aware of when creating your design and also some tips on how to create it fast!

Here at the SPLASH HQ, we are the ones to do all the horribly boring stuff with code and translate your idea into reality on the site. So, without further ado - read on and be in with a chance of winning £40 book tokens and have your design made LIVE on the site!

YOUR DESIGNS CAN BE:
In digital format, for instance: .jpg, .jpg2000 or .tiff, OR
Hand drawn or sketched: on sketch paper. notebook, scrap paper - anything!

In the next image, you will see what elements actually change when designing a new template and what considerations you should have when thinking in terms of colour, image and what rollover links you have when your mouse is over a hyperlink...

Designing your Template In the template image above, you can see what areas you need to think about changing. In order to understand this fully, interact with the templates yourself so you gain a sense of how it works.

Think along an idea of a theme or style that the site can be branded within, keeping a sense of continuity across the page. Take a look at some of the template images below to get a better sense visually of the current designs and start you off with your ideas!

Good luck!

Our Current Templates:

So what are you waiting for? Get designing! Visit the SPLASH site

SPLASH Pilot Groups

2008-09-18T14:16:00.001+01:00

So, we haven't yet talked about our PILOT groups, who they are and what input they will have on the SPLASH project.

Our PILOT groups are a collection of individuals who will actively take part in using all aspects of SPLASH and give us feedback that will help feed into the future development of the project.

The PILOT groups are mainly formed by Students, but there will also be feedback from Staff during this and at later stages, whereby the project will be running 'Open Sessions'; an opportunity for Staff to be introduced to SPLASH and its functions.

Information on this will be covered at a later date.

Our PILOT groups are:

a) Social Work department
b) Product Design department
c) Gender society (no longer a society this year - therefore we are looking to get an alternative group together in liaison with the Student Union)

Load Tests on SPLASH

2008-09-17T11:25:00.001+01:00

So, following a meeting on Monday within the Communications department, SPLASH is set to launch next week on Monday 22nd September, 2008! It's great news and the entire team are very happy about it finally making it to this point.

In order to test the site further, it was brought to the group that SPLASH needed to be tested for load-test across it when concurrent users were to log in and browse around the site. This would mean carrying out performance-intensive tasks such as adding a widget, changing preferences of a widget, applying a new template and a few other user tasks.

I put together a simple document detailing some straight-forward steps for users to carry out in order for all to test out the site in a similar manner at the same time. This was necessary to get an accurate understanding of how the site performed during this intense period.

The test involved around 10 people in Engineering 1 at around 12noon yesterday.

The majority of testers came from IT Services and there were a lot of findings and thoughts expressed:

1. Hour glass flicker on widget-based pages

A few PC users noticed that the cursor was flicking between the arrow icon and the hour glass icon at all times on pages with widgets. They found this distracting. They were all using IE. One of the testers for example is using IE 6 on the new staff desktop

2. Template selection

Quite a few users reported that the page loaded slowly after they selected a new template. I noticed that the mini preview boxes of other templates that could be chosen loaded rather erratically.

3. Adding widgets

A few users reported that the system appeared slow when they added a new widget. Adam for example commented that he was surprised that all of his existing widgets were reloaded when he added a new one and commented that this slowed down the add action.

Other comments arising from the exercise

1. Widget list alphabeticised?

One tester found it hard to find the required widget from the list because she couldn’t see what order the list was in.

2. Facebook widget

Caroline loaded the Facebook widget and it took her a while to get it to work. When it did work it was rather excellent :)

3. Ability to edit widget box titles

A couple of users mentioned that they’d find this helpful

4. Widget help

I wonder whether it would be useful to have specific help available for each widget type outlining any particular issues or workarounds for that widget. I suggested this to Andy earlier when I had to add a parameter to get my blogger blog feed to work.

5. Understanding the Profile

Several of the ITS people who ran Hesan’s tests didn’t realise that their profile would be visible to other SPLASH users. Some of these were Facebook users. They didn’t notice the “padlock” icon or recognise it as a place to lock down access.

Would it be worth printing this on the profile when it’s being accessed by the profile owner?

--<<>>--

I also noticed a few blog posts that were put onto the SPLASH site yesterday and included the following:

Testing Splash
I'm testing splash and it looks pretty good.

looks good!
Cracking stuff, I agree with your slow warning, Passed all the tests with flying colours!

Well done
ps don't like the redrawing of the screen after an action such as add widget or selecting a template.

Splash testing
Well done seems a little slow though, I would prefer new windows rather than redirection from links test

Seems pretty good to me ... wizzed through it!

Contact list
Lost the logic when I went to contacts (luckly HELP/FAQ answered the question).
Common sense told me I wanted to add contacts via the CONTACT page. Was slightly irritated I had to go to courses. Wasn't sure why only selected people could be added? Otherwise, no problem.

Camino
I ran the tests using Camino and all seemed fine.

--<<>>--

It seems as generally there are a few functionality and usability issues arising from the findings alongside the checking of load-times. It was later stated that users noticed a marked decrease in performance whilst all users were accessing the site at the same time. I was not at the actual testing site, but the amount of users being 10 is a fraction of what we would need for an accurate load-test on the entire site. Only time will tell as we await our new users from Fresher's week and returning students from accessing the site.

Is with anything relating to the launch of a new system, you have to in many circumstances simply got to launch the site first with as much work done as possible to allow it to work to an acceptable standard, and then work through the beta development as users bring new issues and areas to the attention of the team. There are a few issues that need ironing out - and in fact alongside yesterdays comments, the Web Team have already made a master list that forms part of the Web Team Blog - an internal area for ideas and comments.

The blog covers some of the current functionality that the site needs work on and some of the future development that we are looking to add into the site.

SPLASH beta site increase in speed

2008-09-15T15:41:00.000+01:00

Well, Andy has done it - and it's all down to one command:

include_once_override=1

APC was an interface Andy asked for IT Services to stick onto the cluster that SPLASH is running on in order to investigate these severe response times we had on the entire part of the site.

Within APC were a whole boat of 'Runtime Settings', one of which was the include_once_override=1 command. This command was initially set at 0 and off. The command linked to within the Zend framework and eventually a .php file.

So, it looks like SPLASH is where it should be at this point in time and we move forwards for a potential launch date next week.

Keep your eye on the blogs for further information ;-)
Well done Andy!

The 'beta' icon

2008-09-12T16:06:00.000+01:00

Well, a lot of people may disagree - but having learnt a lot of design 'tips' over the years, I thought it was a good idea to stick a nice BETA icon next to the SPLASH title at the far left top of the page.

Take a peek below to see what i mean

I remembered it being on a site of an agency that I really love and used to live near me in East London.

Anyway, I think it looks nice and will ensure users are clearly aware that SPLASH is in its beta stages.

dConstruct Conference: Designing the Social Web

2008-09-11T16:13:00.001+01:00

So the team visited the Brighton Dome on Friday 5th, 2008 for a fun filled day to see some speakers talk about numerous aspects of Designing for the Social Web. The setup of the conference was pretty standard - but it was nice to meet up with my predecessor, Beth Granter, whose posts I'm sure you have been reading here up until the end of July.

Coffee, orange juice and tea were in large quantities and lots of small pockets of networking (in the physical sense rather than a web 2.0 sense) was going on in different parts of the foyer. It was a great chance for a bit of bonding to go on between me, the new Web Developer on the SPLASH team: Dominic and the remainder of the Web Team.

A typically rainy day ensured that we got plenty wet before even entering the place. There were some really good talks by various speakers:

Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design
Joshua Porter

Playing the Web (how gaming makes the internet [and the world a better] place)
Aleks Krotoski

Designing for Interaction
Daniel Burka

Designing for the Coral Reef
Matt Jones & Matt Biddulph

As far as relevance to ourselves and SPLASH - there were lots of things to mention. Danile Burka talked about many new functions on the Digg site and how they update their systems, dependent on user interaction and their own development perspectives. The key aspect of his speech being "User led API's/Feeds". Why should anyone have to always have to start at the beginning when going across to a new networking site or tool?

That really what should happen (and has already begun to in small doses), is that whatever and wherever you visit on the Web, you have a clear ability to import in all of your contacts, networks, groups, profile - SHEER EXISTENCE directly into it, without having to start at the beginning.

Why create something new, when you can simply direct from your new location in the digital world a place to collect your bookmarks, your profile, your images and your networks. This is what Daniel Burka communicated - here at SPLASH we all agree.

The talk from Aleks Krotoski and about the lack of interaction between the gaming community and the web community shed some interesting areas. The notion that gamers and gaming developers tend less to interact with web developers in either project based work or in terms of bridging the gap of understanding between them. Does a Playstation 3 developer interact with me or Andy? Hmm, too big of a question to answer here.

The conference also raised some good do's and dont's when creating social based sites:

a) Don't make your users re-register to too much of a degree
b) Don't take your user through too much of a registration process
c) Don't make your users work too hard - have a powerful importing process for all their information and make it easy to setup and change preferences of that widget or rss feed

A lot of common sense in there also, but at the same time it is always a good idea to remember these basic concepts when you look to develop your project in the long-term.

It seems like such a long time ago - not nearly a week. An interesting day, raising some good discussion points within the SPLASH team about our own project and how we could proceed in many of our developing areas, both pre and post-launch.

I have always thought about one thing in the digital world: Simplicity is the key and make the technology work for you - not you work for it. Web 2.0 has definately got that attitude - i.e. letting the technology work for you.

I always believed that Jakob Nielsen had the right idea...

Communications Plan

2008-09-11T15:06:00.001+01:00

Tony has compiled a communications plan that lays the foundation for the SPLASH project. This plan covers a wide area and aims to fulfil the key requirements of the project, whilst maintaining a forward-thinking approach to when we go post SPLASH launch.

There are a number of things coming up that I will be actively involved in and the team are focussed on:

a) SPLASH has got a full page spread in this years Fresher's publication that has already been sent to print

b) Full interview with our Tony Hudson in the edition of Badger

c) In Fresher's week the SPLASH team will have a stall present with free giveaways and goodies to communicate what SPLASH is and how it can improve student's access to information

d) Email notifications out to 1st year students during Fresher's week and to 2nd and 3rd year students in their 1st week back at University

e) The creation of a memorable url for SPLASH (currently completed)

f) The addition of an article in the University Bulletin

g) Staff screensavers to have information about the SPLASH launch

h) To liaise with the SPLASH Pilot Groups and feed the results into the project findings

i) A SPLASH open day whereby all staff will be invited to a location to run through the SPLASH project and it's launch.

These points are by no means exhaustive, but certainly an initial step for SPLASH and it's release to the staff and student community.

I have meanwhile thought about the inclusion of third-party sources, namely books. The books would cover the technologies that the SPLASH project has included and will revolve around Web 2.0 mainly.

Watch this space for further info.

Development and Functionality

2008-09-11T14:40:00.000+01:00

OK, since the end of July, the development team have been working on investing a lot of time into the functionality and working parts of SPLASH both from a mashup/navigation & usability perspective.

The ‘To-Do’ list was prioritised and formed partly from the results of the usability tests with the IT Services team.

Work was carried out in a number of areas:
- Add/Remove profile from public view
- Adding personal tags
- Adding Profile image
- Adding/Remove profile from public view
- Adding a ‘contact’
- Creation of the ‘Latest Blogs’ on the homepage
- Commenting option on blog posts and the inclusion of blog rss ouputs (public)
- Tag cloud searching
- The inclusion of a widget that ties moodle courses into study direct courses
- New templates added to the system
- More Help files added to guide the user
- Changed the notion of ‘Friend’ to ‘Contact', (to maintain a certain difference to obvious places such as facebook and myspace & communicate more of an educational perspective)

Thoughts were given to the exporting of blog & contacts lists via xml & xfn. Though it was later decided the best way forward was to consider this following the rollout of SPLASH. This could then also be alongside the possibility of hCard, which was actually discussed at the dConstruct conference in Brighton (which I’ll post about later).

It is clear that the majority of the development work carried out since the end of July 2008 has been all about adding ‘value’ to the site in terms of user experience. Since these functions have been added to SPLASH, there have been some teething problems in terms of the Zend Framework and the problems we experienced in terms of System Slowness that related to the Mac OSX Tiger.

I wish to talk about the cluster setup over at IT Services, as we very are lucky to have this team assisting us – but it deserves a separate entry this month.

For the time being however, it certainly feels that SPLASH has come a considerable distance in terms of what you can do and how you can do it.

IT Services Usability Results - 8th August, 2008

2008-09-11T12:54:00.000+01:00

So, the team got SPLASH in front of the IT Services team here at the University of Sussex to carry out usability testing across the entire site. The members of the team carrying out the usability tests were:

Chris Limb - FF2, Student Desktop
Carol Shergold - FF, Student Desktop
Amy Waldron - FF2, Vista
Andy Clews - Student Desktop
Michele Saliman - IE, Student Desktop
Patricia O'Brien - IE, Student Desktop
Veronica Trickett - FF, Student Desktop
Mark Parsons - IE6, Student Desktop
Jane Major - IE6, Student Desktop
Dave Lewney - Mac ibook G4, OSX 10.4.11, FF2.0.0.12
Ian Eiloart - Mac
Katie Damen - FF, Student Desktop
Gill Powell - IE6, Student Desktop
Arran Cudbard-Bell - FF, Student Desktop

Where FF(version)=Firefox / IE(version)=Internet Explorer / OSX(version)

There was a detailed breakdown of usability that looked at the site in terms of the following:

General – overview of the site
Homepage
Dashboard Widgets – General
Flickr, YouTube, CDEC, Study Direct course links, facebook, weather, delicious, Hello world, Image, Netvibes, RSS feed widgets
Profile
Blog
Contacts
Courses
Settings

General Pages
are slow to load
Impression is that SPLASH is a sub-set of Sussex Internal - is this right?

Homepage
Needs to look visually appealing to users - pictures etc
Currently points to dashboard, should go to homepage
Would be good to show privacy settings here as a reminder to people

Dashboard
People don't understand the difference between Dashboard and Profile

Widgets – general
Be good to tell users what they have done when widget added
It is not immediately obvious that users should edit the widget to set their own details
GIFs should be PNG
An external link preview would be helpful
There should be a cancel button for if you change your mind about updating settings
Changing widget settings is a bit slow
Set a scroll region below the SPLASH menus
Can be hard to click on Settings icon, have to click twice
Developer name/version: what does this mean? Why do we need it?
V difficult to drag and drop new widgets to top of page - needs columns?
Spanner doesn't look much like a spanner
Change Add a widget to close when widget load window open
Highlighted area doesn't always move or is slow - misleading, you think you can't move it
Removing widgets with the x is slow

Flickr widget
Using a valid username (carolshergold): error generated "username does not exist". Entering the username again pulls in photos but says "username not found" again.
Says 'To hopefully display the name of a photo'. Should this say 'photostream'?
First attempt accepted my username but showed wrong pictures - tried again and worked OK. Clicking on settings generated error and crashed out when clicked OK (error #3)

YouTube widget
Video too wide for widget in 1024x768 resolution
Nothing comes up
Not clear that you have to set this - could it take you to YouTube?
YouTube code is confusing as the user hasn't entered it
Entering a genuine video code doesn't work in IE
Not clear that you need the YouTube id

CDEC widget
Selected 'Show descriptions' from spanner but nothing happened

Study Direct course links widget
An error occurred

Facebook widget
Error adding fb widget on login to facebook http://www.new.facebook.com/desktopapp.php?api_key=5efb77b97375f66bde1ba5347f1116c7&error. Needs recreating as once successfully logged in as user, can only add/remove widget, not go back to the beginning.
People don't know what Copy Me means
Got error when adding Facebook widget
Crashed out when clicked on Settings icon

Weather widget
No spanner

Delicious widget
Adding a non-existent Delicious username generates an unhandled exception
Clicking on links makes page load instead of SPLASH - had to reload SPLASH and wait for all widgets to reload

Hello World widget
Error #3 when clicked on Settings

Image widget
Image from Flickr displayed title not image
Image pulled in from SkillClouds site was bigger than the widget size
Image pulled in from SD was bigget than widget size
Would be nice to be able to control/change image size, or to cancel
Click on tag and get an error message
Would be nice to have a browse/capture button for URL
Could image use url as default name?

NetVibes Digg
Message "Loading the UWA Widget" but nothing happens.
Under settings there are no options to alter the settings.
Crashed on Edit and editing HTML block (error #3)

RSS Feed widget
Needs a default which is meaningful to students

Profile
Clicking on Profile for first time generates error #1
Facebook widget not available from drop down
Shouldn't Profile mirror Dashboard, widgets wise?
Didn't know what padlock icon did - not clear this is for privacy
Clicked on padlock and got ref memory error (#3), then system crashed out

Blog
Title is smaller than
formatting within blog post - looks odd
WYSIWYG behaves oddly if trying to apply H3
Adding further tags is truncated if no commas are used
Add Comment option is visible when looking at top level of blog
What does Path: p mean?
It is not clear how to add comments to another user's blog
I can add a comment to my own blog but not another user's
Where does my blog load to, I can't see it if I don't exit the edit page
Comment section looks like blog text area
Blog text looks like sub-heading in blog posts
Would be nice if 'add new blog post' was not just a link - this is inconsistent with rest of site
Too many edit options for comments - why does this need to be formatted?
Can choose more than one privacy option at the same time
Main input area v small
Privacy options s/be radio buttons
Blog layout very spaced out
WYSIWYG editor allows multimple pop ups for editing - is this right?

Contacts
No one in Contacts, all in courses
After adding friends, goes back to Contacts rather than Courses
Consistency between Friends & Contacts naming needs checking
Would be great to be able to see who is online

Courses
Clicking on Courses takes me back to the Dashboard (could just be on people set up as tutors?)

Settings
Privacy: tick boxes look like tick boxes but behave like radio buttons

In conclusion, there were some positive comments that the team conveyed in the appearance and general user experience of the site:

Tag clouds on blogs are a nice touch
Layout when adding widgets is good
Like the settings changing bit - straightforward & in keeping with look and feel of site
Tagging the blog is v easy and straightforward - V good
Like the fact is says logged in as my name, not as my username code
Robots Rule!
Nice cats
Woot! Yay!
Blog tagging good
Blog posts coped with lots of funny symbols

Introduction

2008-09-10T16:05:00.000+01:00

Without further ado, I thought it paramount to introduce myself into the SPLASH project.

My name is Hesan David Yousif and I have taken over from the lovely Beth Granter who has now moved onto pastures new. My role is as a Project Developer, but to be honest, everyone here mucks in on everything in order to get things done.

I'm quite aware that there hasn't been an update for some time on our blog, but I shall be changing all that. Over the coming 24 hours I will be talking about what has been happening in the following areas:

a) Development & the addition of various new functionality on SPLASH
b) Usability results from I.T Services at the University of Sussex held on 8th August, 2008
c) The SPLASH launch communications plan (plans for the initial roll-out of the project)
d) dConstruct conference: Designing the Social Web and the team's thoughts
d) SPLASH Pilot Groups and what we aim to do with them.

There is no doubt that at the current time, we are all at a critical moment in the SPLASH project, with a few things to overcome. However, I am confident that once we iron out these issues, we can all look forward to experiencing a positive addition to our educational environment.

Meanwhile, I remember what Socrates used to say: 'Wisdom begins in wonder'.

System slowness

2008-07-15T10:42:00.000+01:00

While developing the SPLASH system we experienced some very dramatic speed differences between running the system on the web cluster and other machines, for example, a personal computer. Speeds differences such as almost immediate for the personal computer and up to 30 seconds for a page display while running on the cluster.

Naturally, this required a fair amount of investigation...

It was quickly ruled out that the framework we're developing the system with, Zend Framework, was not to blame. After all, it is being used by companies such as IBM, Zend, Sourceforge, Fox, and more. If the framework were not suitable and produced slow results then they would obviously not use it.

Next to be ruled out was custom code built on top of ZF. With the exact same code-base producing faster results on one machine and not on another it was highly unlikely to be the code.

Profiling the code proved a little helpful. We profiled the database connection for each query and ruled out any slowness with that as all queries were taking fractions of seconds. Code profiling was a little bit more tricky, as everything seemed proportionally slower, not any one thing in particular. However, the Zend_Loader component seemed to be taking quite some time to perform its tasks.

With a little command-line magic (using ktrace, kdump, grep, awk, etc.) it was determined that the OS itself, Mac OSX 'Tiger', was mainly to blame. The cause of the problem was trying to determine relative paths and the slow speed at which Tiger was doing this...

With PHP it's possible to set your include path. It might look something like, ".:/usr/bin/php:/home/www/includes", which means if you simply include a file with:

include "library.php";

then PHP will try to find the files along the included paths, first in the current directory, then /usr/bin/php, and so on for as many paths as you have defined. However, to determine the current directory, '.', the OS needs to back track all the way to the root, get the whole list of directories and work out which inode matches the one your current path is, and then work its way back down the directories until it finds a match. Once it's done that you have your current path. If it sounds intensive, that's because it is.

When comparing Tiger to Leopard we were seeing a 1000x improvement (4 microseconds as opposed to 4 milliseconds).

If you used the include path for a handful of files you'd never notice a significant drop in speed, but SPLASH (because of the Zend Framework) will typically include 140+ files.

So how was the issue resolved?

For the short term there is a very simple fix; simply alter the include path so that the current path is last to be checked and the more significant paths (such as where the SPLASH or Zend library are located) are first. This simple tweak took a 30+ second load time to around two seconds - a vast improvement! Still, two seconds is not ideal so we will be having Leopard-based machine installed on the web cluster to see if that also helps to increase performance.

Screencasting, user guides, and Auntie Kath

2008-07-07T12:49:00.000+01:00

Thinking more about user support, last week we had a meeting with Bill Ashraf - Director of Technology Enhanced Learning in Biochemistry and the School of Life Sciences at Sussex. I was originally intending on creating video tutorials for SPLASH and posting them to various video sharing sites. Bill suggested that we go one step further and do some live tutorials for users via online conference software, WebEx. Today we experienced this software via a live WebEx teleconference with one of their trainers. The software allows users to take control of each others' screens and therefore to use software on someone else's computer even if that software isn't installed on their own computer. It is not a free service though, and we haven't had chance to evaluate alternatives such as Elluminate yet (I'm not sure yet if this allows users to control and see each others' screens, or is just a web conferencing tool).

So far my thinking about the live web tutorial is that this could be useful for demos of SPLASH for tutors, but I don't think students will have the motivation to attend a scheduled software tutorial that is entirely optional and not course based. I do think however that a series of short tutorials on different features of SPLASH would be viewed by students when they felt the need. These videos I think would be more succinct if they were a simple screencast rather than a recording of a previous teleconference, because the teleconference would be likely to be fitted to specific individuals' queries and needs.

Also, as part of the dissemination activities, last week I attended a Sussex open coffee meeting at the Innovation centre on campus, and talked to local entrepreneurs about the SPLASH project. They were interested to know how they could let future graduates know about their businesses and the career opportunities they may provide. I met Ian Ozvald from showmedo.com which is a website about making tutorials using Screencasting. There are even screencast tutorials on making screencast tutorials! So I'll be watching those this week.

I can only hope my SPLASH demos are as popular as Auntie Kath's iphone demonstration.

SPLASH logo design

2008-07-04T12:32:00.000+01:00

Although the Sussex installation of the SPLASH software has yet to have a confirmed name, the software itself will be called SPLASH (similar to how the Moodle Software is called Study Direct at Sussex). So the software itself needs a logo and as it is being developed at Sussex it needs to be Sussex branded. Here is the first set of logos I presented to the Publications and Branding team:

They told me that the 'US' and the 'University of Sussex' part of the logo both need to be present, so I took the everybody's favourite logo layout and tried it in all the colours from the latest Postgraduate Prospectus, as this palette will be on brand but not using school colours, which are only supposed to be used in relation to that school:

Then I found out that the 'US University of Sussex' part of the logo has to stay Sussex Slate coloured. Although it was tempting to use the pink version because the contrast really made the SPLASH part of the logo stand out, we felt that the watery turquoise suited the word 'splash' better, so we went with that. Also it was pointed out by the Publications and Branding team that although the word 'And' is part of the SPLASH acronym, when written in full this does not need to be capitalised. This is the logo that we will use in general for the SPLASH software from now on:

However, we realised that when this is used very small, like the avatar logo on the Get Satisfaction website, it is hard to read the 'Student Personal Learning and Social Homepages' part of the logo. So I redesigned this logo for small use without the acronym written in full. I came up with these five designs:

And we decided to go for the fourth one:

It is kind of a shame that we can't have an image of a water droplet or similar as an icon for SPLASH, but that would be against the University's brand.

Customer service

2008-07-02T15:23:00.000+01:00

Users can choose to ask a question, share an idea, report a problem, or start a discussion.Users and administrators can check the mood around a certain topic to see how it is affecting users.

So I've been thinking about how we will manage the 'customer service' / user support side of SPLASH once it's launched, because however good we make it, there will always be questions and ideas from the users which need to be managed.

Over the last few months I have been using Get Satisfaction to communicate with various web companies (e.g. Twitter, Pownce), and the site has seemed very user friendly to me. Users can submit questions, problems and ideas to a service provider and they can get responses to their posts from the rest of the user community and from the service provider employees themselves. Having public customer service has the benefit of showing your users that you are working to solve problems and that you are listening to their concerns. Allowing your users to help each other out with using a site also saves you the trouble. Another great feature of Get Satisfaction is that when a user enters a query, similar queries that have already been posted are suggested to the user, which reduces the likelihood of duplicate reports.Saying "I have this problem too!" allows the service provider to assess which problems are affecting the most people and the 'mood' settings for each problem allow assessment of which problems are the most frustrating for your users. Get Satisfaction also has an API and sites can brand their customer service area while using the getsatisfaction system.

In the SPLASH spirit of encouraging the use of external services, today I've set up an account for SPLASH on getsatisfaction.com so that we can deal with queries about the system via their service. Hopefully I will be able to set up an account where queries are emailed to the helpdesk so they can be logged by the internal Sussex based system (whilst being dealt with publicly and including the SPLASH community in the support on getsatisfaction.com). The API use and branding of the SPLASH page is the part I haven't set up yet as so far I just created a Get Satisfaction account for SPLASH and am waiting for confirmation of the account (they check that the company is real before allowing you a company account). They only allow you to set up as a Company or Organization, which then have Products, but I didn't want to take control of a University of Sussex account, so I just set up SPLASH as a company, even though it is really a product. Hopefully the system will all make sense for SPLASH despite this though.

Usability test overview

2008-06-11T12:41:00.000+01:00

Five usability tests took place over the last two weeks and the following is a summary of the findings, and what we intend to do as a result of them. The students taking part were from the three pilot groups for the project:

User 1: Gender society postgraduate (1^st year)
User 2: Product design undergraduate (1^st year)
User 3: Gender society undergraduate (4^th year)
User 4: Gender society undergraduate (4^th year)
User 5: Social work undergraduate (3^rd year)

We tested the system with each person individually. Before the test each user was introduced to the idea behind the SPLASH project. Each test took between 20 and 40 minutes, during which time the user was asked to complete a series of tasks (below in bold), and to discuss any difficulty they had in doing so. They were then asked a few questions intended to indicate their previous level of experience with social software. The screen and conversations were recorded using Bulent's screen recorder. Test questions and instructions provided to the user [27KB DOC].

Logging in:

Mainly OK. Some initial confusion over whether to use normal Sussex username. One user thought they were supposed to log in to Sussex direct, not noticing the login form. Other users all saw the login form OK so this can be treated as an anomaly.

Adding a widget to the Dashboard:

The first user added a widget to the Profile instead of the Dashboard. We then made the widget adding contextual – so it knew where you’d clicked ‘Add widget’ from.

Privacy settings were expected to be at the point that you add and/or edit the widget.

Two users expressed that they didn’t know what a widget was, but in the context of the Dashboard and Profile, on clicking ‘Add widget’, they understood. Things like RSS need to be explained, and the purpose of each widget needs more detail in the description before you add it. The term ‘widget’ probably needs to be explained in a tooltip or removable help box.

After selecting a widget, two users didn’t click the ‘add widget’ button but thought the widget would be added on selecting from the drop-down list. To fix this we have moved the ‘add widget’ button closer to the drop-down list and made it only appear once you have chosen a widget to add. Also it is possible that the widget metadata (creator, version etc.) is superfluous information for the user.

Editing widget settings:

Significantly almost every user went straight to the main ‘Settings’ page and only one user went straight to the spanner icon. The word ‘edit’ or ‘settings’ needs to be added next to the spanner.

In the Flickr widget, one user thought they could use their Sussex username, even though they didn’t have a Flickr account. Then they thought a username was mandatory despite the default being blank. Therefore, non-sussex widgets need to be explicit when asking for usernames/passwords etc. There should also be links to further information about the external site.

One user accidentally clicked the ‘close’ icon when aiming for the spanner. The close icon needs to be moved to the right hand side of the widget.

Looking at your own profile:

Users found their profile OK but 3/5 kept clicking ‘My profile’, thinking it hadn’t loaded properly, because there was no content. Some default content such as a default profile picture, their name and possibly their degree programme was expected.

Adding a widget to the Profile:

The first user found the ‘select a location’ unnecessary but this is now contextual anyway. Other users were impressed at the privacy settings knowing their courses.

Adding a profile picture:

Most users went to the main ‘Settings’ page. No user knew how to get the URL of an image (and most didn’t know what URL of image meant) so this definitely needs explaining if we are not allowing profile picture uploads.

Adding a blog post:

A bug was found that when no title is entered, the blog post will not be saved. Adding a blog with no title should prompt you to add one.

Changing blog privacy:

Some users found this OK but others went to Settings > Privacy. Where it currently says ‘Available to:’, it should say Privacy as a title above this section.

Tagging the blog:

Only one user knew what Tagging meant. One user couldn’t find where to tag the post (at this point the ‘tag’ input box required scrolling down. Maybe the default blog content box should start smaller so the tag input box is visible from the start). One user thought Tagging was just for people’s names. This is likely due to their only experience of tagging being with Facebook, where when you write a ‘note’, you tag people who are mentioned in that note, and when you tag a photo, you tag people in it. The concept of tagging by topic was new to most users. We should explain tagging in a tooltip next to the Tags input box. Possibly provide an example tag.

Adding a blog comment:

One user wanted to know how to edit comments other people have left on her blog post. That user also thought it was important that people external to Sussex should be able to comment, being authenticated by providing an email address, otherwise they thought the blog would be very limiting if it is meant to be a person’s main blog.

In one case the comment form did not load – this may be due to the privacy being set to ‘people on my friends list’ – this bug needs to be investigated.

Finding a list of coursemates:

All users found this without any difficulty. One user pointed out that if a user can remove themselves from the coursemates list, it needs to be made clear that you are not necessarily seeing the complete list. This user thought it was important to have tutors listed alongside contacts and coursemates.

All users expressed delight at seeing a list of their coursemates and seeing what courses their friends are taking.

Moving a widget:

Initially there was no ‘move’ mouse symbol when you hover over the widget handle, but when this was pointed out we added this. This still needs to be made so that it only shows when you’re viewing your own profile. Then, other users were OK at moving the widget.

Change the default privacy settings for your profile:

This was found easily but it needs to be made clear what these are the settings FOR, e.g. ‘Default widget and blog privacy settings’ and make it clear that previously set privacy options will or will not be over written on saving.

Other comments and requests (my thoughts in italics):

The ‘Home’ link doesn’t work yet.
The default template looks a lot like Facebook.
“It is informal, not as much as Facebook because it is within the University, but it is ok ethically for students and tutors to be in the same space and to message each other here, whereas it would be strange/inappropriate within Facebook”.
Some confusion as to whether previously added widgets had gone on to the Dashboard or Profile. (Maybe the Dashboard should appear more different to the profile).
‘Anyone at all’ should say ‘fully public and listed by search engines’. It should at least contain the words ‘search engines’. (More investigation is required into whether people understand that ‘visible by anyone at all’ or ‘fully public’ includes search engine listing, or if this needs to be made explicit.)
Make search for (people/blog posts etc). Make the search able to search the whole internet. (People can use Google or other search engines to search the internet. Generally it is better to not limit the search in the first instance, although search results should be returned in sections based on their type of content, and then you should be able to filter by content type).
The word ‘dashboard’ is clear because user has experience with Wordpress but is not sure if other people would know. Before visiting ‘home’ user is not sure what to expect on the home page (Once there is more content on SPLASH and the logged out ‘homepage’ has content, it will be more clear what will be on the logged in homepage).
Extra tools and useful links would be helpful in the dashboard, e.g. to email. (This is a good idea for how other systems might like to hook in to SPLASH – if they don’t want a complete widget but would like a link to their section of the website, they could potentially be one of a set of default links in a user-customisable navigation bar on the dashboard – or throughout SPLASH – which the user can add or delete links to/from)
The word Dashboard makes sense to the user. User mainly uses Facebook and goes on other people’s photo websites like Flickr and Photobucket, and also looks at other people’s content on YouTube.
“So from here can you get to your Study Direct and Sussex Direct and it’s going to have all of our Facebook and those sort of things in it?” I then explained that SPLASH would have Facebook in it but Study/Sussex Direct would not be changing. There is some confusion over where SPLASH sits in relation to other student systems.
Can you get your Sussex Direct timetable on your dashboard? Yes but not yet
Can you get Epicentre events on here? Yes if they provide an RSS feed.
Is there going to be any chat or messaging? No instant messaging but you will be able to message (email) them from SPLASH.
Can you have notification of when you have received a Sussex email on SPLASH? Hopefully eventually but probably not to start off with
“The Dashboard could have a little sentence explaining what it is for, or call it your Control Centre or something. Or once people get used to Dashboard people will be fine and it will catch on, it just needs a little explanation to begin with.” This is certainly a good idea – it would be good if there was an explanation box which could be removed by the user once they felt comfortable with the purpose of the Dashboard. This method could also be used elsewhere where necessary.
“I use Facebook and MySpace. I use YouTube for watching videos but haven’t uploaded anything. I use LimeWire.”
“I think it’s a really good idea”.

Development so far

2008-05-20T11:47:00.000+01:00

Since the last post, I have been planning and organising some usability tests which are due to happen on the 28th and 30th May (next week) with students from our pilot groups. The usability tests will test out the functionality of the real SPLASH site so far. Also, I have made three colour schemes for SPLASH, each with their own stylesheet which the user will be able to apply to their browsing session within SPLASH.

Andy has been working hard programming to a point where Tony and myself can now program some widgets for the dashboard and profile pages. So far it is possible to log in using your Sussex username and password (this uses LDAP authentication). The system will then be aware of what classes you are taking and what other users are in your class. Once logged in, you will be taken to your dashboard. Various widgets are available, including:

Flickr - searches Flickr.com for public images based on either a username or a tag which the user enters. The user can also choose the size and number of the images returned.
RSS - displays the content of an RSS feed which the user has entered.
HTML - allows text to be entered by the user and rendered as HTML. This means HTML 'badges' that are provided by external sites, can be displayed, e.g. a Facebook badge.
Image - displays an image with a title when the user enters a title and the URL of an image that is already online. This can be used for profile pictures for example.
Hello World! - this is a template widget, created to aid further widget creation. It currently displays the content of a text box which the user can fill out, and the current time.

When a user changes and saves the settings of a widget, that widget will reload with the new settings.

The user can also add blog posts, with associated tags, and have people leave comments related to that post. Posts, as well as widgets on the profile page, can all have privacy privileges associated to them.

What order will the parts of the project need to be developed in?

2008-02-20T16:29:00.000Z

Technical group meeting notes:

In attendance:
Tony Hudson
Andy Collington
Carol Shergold
Paolo Oprandi
Beth Granter

Discussion topic: What order will the parts of the project need to be developed in?

LDAP Authentication module
Access Control List functions (permissions)
Login interface
Layout template in three 'styles'
Widget 'skeleton' for basic feed display
Class list display
'Friends' management and display
Groups functionality
Basic minimal blog with permissions

Extra things include machine tagging each course so blog posts can easily be associated to specific courses by users, which would remove complications from typos, misspellings etc.

A prerequisite for the whole project is that XSLT needs to be recompiled into PHP. We need to take this up with ITS to sort this out.

Also discussed was availability of students for testing. I will email the students in March to see what their May-June availability will be.

Technical documentation - Potential software comparison / matrix

2008-02-18T10:56:00.000Z

Over the past month we have completed a technical comparison of Social Networking Software - Elgg 0.9 and Mahara 0.9.1. This was done by listing the main requirements for the SPLASH project, which were drawn up from the initial project plan and the user-tested mockup design, and stating a figure between 0 and 1 for each requirement, which was meant to represent how well each system achieved each requirement. 1 would be completely satisfactory, 0 would be not at all.

SPLASH technical documentation matrix - Elgg versus Mahara [XLS]

As a result of this matrix it was decided that neither of the systems satisfied enough of our requirements, and it would be better to build the system in-house. Both Mahara and Elgg were found to be good pieces of software for the purposes they were built for. However, the effort required to adapt the systems to fit our needs could end up being greater than starting from scratch. What we intend to do though, isn't exactly starting from scratch because we will be using the Zend Framework Library as our framework base. We also found that there wasn't currently strong documentation or community support for either Elgg or Mahara.

Potentially, our system could in the future have a development community around it if it is taken on by other users.

*edit* 29 February 2008 - I think I forgot to publish this previously - here is an expansion on the technical requirements [45K doc].

Meeting about Skillclouds

2008-02-11T11:00:00.000Z

Recently we met with staff from the Skillclouds project. The following issues arose:

Are we going to allow file uploads?
So far in the SPLASH project we haven't planned to allow any file hosting at Sussex because the main point of the project is to allow students to manage their resources which remain as user owned (i.e. externally hosted sites). Apart from allowing users to choose which file hosting site they wish to use depending on their needs, a benefit of keeping their content external is that when they are no longer Sussex students, they remain in control of their content and nothing is lost. Even if we allowed a packaged download of all of a user's files when they leave university, they would not be able to keep all their categories, tags or comments when they bulk-upload the files to an external site. Creation of an internal CMS has not been part of the SPLASH project plan - it's more about feeds and communication.

The only content we are planning on hosting at Sussex is blog (text) content. Because there are standard export formats for blogs, it will be possible for a student to export their blog content into a new externally hosted blog when they leave.

The issue with this is that content which is imported from an external site has to be fully public on that external site. So if someone is making a private Sussex hosted blog post and they want a private image in the blog post too, it wouldn't really be possible. However, for now at least, we think this situation is unlikely to be a common one, so the issue isn't central to the project at the moment.

Also, the alternative to posting an image fully publicly on a website such as flickr would be to set the image to private on that site, but each image still has a URL so you can embed it in a private post and it will display. Setting it to private means it won't display in an RSS feed of images, or be visible on your photo album to other users, or show up to search engines. Effectively, the image isn't strictly private because anyone who found out the URL of the image could view it, but as long as you don't publish that URL anywhere public, it wouldn't come up in search engines or be browse-to-able. It's highly unlikely someone would type the correct URL into their browser too. So, hopefully this would be enough to satisfy most situations.

Are we going to use the Moodle blog?
In short, no. This is because the Moodle blog would require a lot of work to make it fit our mockup design, and this would create project dependency between work going on with Study Direct (Moodle) and SPLASH.

Where would tutors view students' blog posts?
Tutors could view student blog posts which have been associated by the student to their specific course as a widget on their dashboard. This is assuming the tutor will have a SPLASH account of their own. There could also be a feed created of blog posts associated to a certain course, which would be sent to Moodle for tutors to display in a 'block' within Study Direct. Rather than showing all posts, it would be best to show the latest 3-5 posts' titles, with a 'view all' link. Clicking the titles would take you to that specific post within SPLASH. For example:

How could the Skillclouds project fit in with the SPLASH project?
We came up with the idea that users would be offered a widget to display on their profiles their skills in a 'tagcloud' format. It wouldn't be a true tagcloud because normal tagclouds have varying sized words based on how many times each word (tag) has been used. The idea for this would be that people could just choose the size of the word themselves, possibly by using a 'resize/edit' option. For example:

Template for this blog

2008-01-23T12:36:00.000Z

There's been a great rise of interest in blogging at Sussex lately, with lots of people asking for the template to this blog. I did publish it in a blog post here before, but in case anyone can't find it, here's the latest template [XML].

You can't just paste it in because there are various parts of HTML that you need to copy across from your Sussex website and paste in to the relevant sections.

The template has all the instructions for a basic University of Sussex themed blog and unfortunately we don't currently offer support on how to do this because we don't officially offer a blogging system at Sussex at the moment.

You will need basic HTML editing skills to be able to implement this template into your blogger blog, and be familiar with editing Blogger templates, to the extent that you understand the 'Page elements' page and the 'Edit HTML' page.

The things in the right hand column on this page are specific to the SPLASH blog so instructions aren't provided. However, using this template will create a right hand column that should be empty (I think). To put content into it, go to the Page Elements page and insert content into the relevant elements.

For convenience, I've copied and pasted all the instructions from the template to here:

Note: Some adjustments are needed to fix the very right hand edges of everything, as currently they cause a permanent horizontal scroll bar. Also each blog post must be longer than whatever is in the left hand column or there will be lots of white space between the end of the most recent post and the rest of the main content.
Sussex slate bar (top navigation): Make a div with class 'slateBar' and paste in the HTML from the slate bar of a Sussex page. Put this element at the top.
Sussex replacement Header: Make a div of id 'sussex_header' and write in your title within p tags. Put this element 2nd down, below the slate bar.
Sussex departmental bar (departmental navigation): Make a div with id 'sussex_departmental_bar' and paste in the HTML from the coloured bar from your Sussex site. This element goes below the sussex_header element (3rd down). Change the colour in 'fonts and colours' to match.
.subtitle is the replacement for .description: Make a div with id 'subtitle' and put in your subtitle. Place this element below sussex_departmental_bar (4th down).

It shouldn't matter whether you put all the HTML into one Page Element or separate ones, but I prefer to put them in separate ones so I can keep track of where they will end up.

Notifications / activity feed

2008-01-16T17:12:00.001Z

Just wanted to draw attention to the best way of managing your activity feed that I've seen:

SPOKEO

I don't like the design of the site in itself, but the UI is very logical and easy to use and functions exactly as you would expect or want.

If we could do something like this within SPLASH it would be fantastic.

Spokeo accesses your friends list from various services such as flickr and last.fm and then brings in newly added content from any of your friends from any of those services. You can even tell it when you have a friend with different identities on each service and it will integrate those feeds into one for that person. You can also group people however you want, which is really useful, and re-name people so when they've called themselves something obscure you can put in their real name or whatever you call them. The service doesn't do any communication between people, it's simply a way to view what your contacts are doing. One great thing it does with last.fm is that when a friend listens to a song, that song comes up in Spokeo and you can listen to it directly within Spokeo, without going to Last.fm. But then that track doesn't appear to scrobble to your Last.fm profile.

Elgg alternatives?

2008-01-08T13:53:00.000Z

Today I found this list of 25 open source social networking softwares.

I was quite excited, but clicking through them, they are almost all the result of an individual and haven't been deployed to any great extent. The closest to something useable from our point of view was the University of Manitoba's Virtual Learning Commons, but the user profiles seem very limited.

Also none of the systems appear to have a community of developers like Elgg does.

*edit* Looking again at the VLC, it seems to be very successful at the University of Manitoba, but would not be suitable for the SPLASH project, which requires:
- a blogging system
- the ability to bring in content from external sources to your profile
- privacy settings for every section
- user templating ability
- rss reader (dashboard)

**edit2** Today I discovered Mahara. This looks very much like Elgg but prettier and the UI makes more sense. But it doesn't do RSS as well, in terms of bringing it in or sending it out. We'll be adding this to the technical requirements matrix (to be published this week).

Mockup demonstration

2007-11-22T14:09:00.000Z

We decided to showcase the mockup to the pilot groups all together at InQbate on Sussex campus. InQbate has a physical environment which can be edited by its users, so we felt that this would be an excellent setting from which to introduce SPLASH, which will increase the opportunity for personalisation of users' online environments.

A free lunch was provided to students to encourage them to attend the session, which was a great success and useful feedback was received. Overall the response was positive and students seemed interested and excited about the project. Photos from the day have been uploaded to Flickr and can be seen in the column to the right. A video of the event has also been uploaded to YouTube:

Comments from the students were written on the wall:

We intend on bringing in the forums from study direct. These won't be new forums, but will be the same forums as in study direct, but visible in a new area, within the Community pages.

As to other imported content, they won't be actively monitored, but if there is offensive content that is flagged up by another user, we'll have to check it doesn't break any of our guidelines (such as bullying for example).

Thanks! Glad you like our plans. Members of the pilot groups (Product Design students, Social Work students and members of the Gender Society) will all be able to start testing the system as soon as it is built - which should be in June 2008.

People have the option as to what they bring in to the system. If they prefer to keep their social lives separate, they might choose to only import academic materials and resources into their profile pages.

We expect people to bring in photos, blogs, videos and links to favourite sites, mainly. If enough people request a new feature, we hope to develop the system to support it.

Due to the constantly evolving nature of the use of new sites across the web, we will need to continually develop SPLASH in order to keep up with web trends and hook into new systems.

Thanks - that's exactly what we are designing the system for. It's nice to see that the purpose of the project has been understood.

We'll keep this in mind and try to make privacy issues even more explicit.

We'll also consider the possibility of recording previous privacy settings.

Mock-up

2007-10-15T12:39:00.000+01:00

Here finally is the first publicly published mock-up of what we hope to achieve with the SPLASH project. Many of the points made during the user-testing of the initial mock-up have been incorporated into this design. Still to be incorporated is a section for Student Union Societies and also the ability for students to create ad-hoc groups with a group profile page. Currently Facebook Groups do not have RSS feeds for each section. It is possible to bring in a list of members of a group, and to get a list of all the groups an individual is a member of (if this information is already public), however Facebook do intend to create RSS feeds for each section of a group's information in the next few months. More information on upcoming changes to facebook groups (techPresident article).

To view the mock-up you will need Flash player installed on your computer.

Please have a go at clicking around the mock-up and seeing where you can get. You can effectively 'log-in' without typing anything into the input boxes. Some of the functionality won't work (managing friends, messaging, altering styles etc.) and dragging and dropping widgets (sections) doesn't work on the mock-up.

Please comment below with your ideas, opinions and questions.

Edit 30.11.2007 - I've just linked to the newer version of the mockup above. The older version is here.

Usability testing - feedback

2007-09-24T09:18:00.000+01:00

The usability tests were run on 4 people:
1. Tom Shaw - Graduate Intern (University staff and Graduate)
2. Penny Williams - Content Editor (University staff and Graduate)
3. Koos Couvée - Student Union Communications Officer (student)
4. Saul Reid - Student Union Education Officer (student)

Feedback from Tom:
Tom took the initial test - Tom has an average level of familiarity with social networking sites and user-generated-content sites for a Graduate.

Community homepage: Make the point of 'Community' clearer to the user, by giving examples of what you might do within the Community area. Originally when you logged on, you were left on the community homepage but the styles would change. Tom suggested that when you log in from the community homepage you are taken straight to your dashboard, as this would be where you are likely to want to go next anyway.
Advanced search page: Add the ability to search by event tag/type, and to search by tutor, to see what the tutor wants you to read.
Dashboard: Make sure each feed is clear about its source in the title (e.g. don't just say 'music', say 'Last.FM'). The ability to browse through photos (rather than just see the few latest added and click through to the host site) within SPLASH was requested. In fact, the ability to browse by media type was requested, i.e. to have a whole page for pictures, one for video etc.
Add widget to dashboard: Make it clear which have already been added. Explain notifications/mail (this was already there, but was not seen by Tom). Explain what 'any feed' is - give an example. The whole concept of a 'feed' was new to Tom so this needs to be explained.
Privacy: Using the word 'private' in the same section as the checkboxes to add viewers was confusing. Wording of the privacy section, and how you select various options, needs to be clearer.
Feeds from friends could maybe go on the friends page (as a user might choose not to have it on their dashboard, and prefer to have all feeds about their friends alongside their friends list). Ditto for the classmates page.
Profile: When you are looking at someone elses profile, you should be able to message them directly from their page, and have the option to add them to your friends list.

Before the next usability test, a few changes were applied:

An explanation of the Community area and examples have been added in a large typeface on the community homepage.
Logging in from the community homepage now takes you to your dashboard.
'Added' written next to widgets that have already been added on the 'add widget' page.
The explanation of what a notification/mail widget is has been moved to above the input boxes, so the user will read this before wondering what to put in the boxes.
An example of an RSS feed and a link to the BBC explanation of RSS has been added.
Music widget renamed 'Last.FM'.

Feedback from Penny:
Penny has minimum experience with using social networking sites but has some experience with browsing and searching user-generated-content sites.

Move the titles of the pages to below all navigation so it is clearer what page you are on.
Have a 'key' so the user understands the icons, such as the 'edit settings' screwdriver icon.
Put boxes around each section on pages with multiple sections, such as the 'privacy' page.
A glossary to explain terms like 'widget' would be helpful. This would probably go in the 'help' section.

Feedback from Koos and Saul:
Koos and Saul took the test together, with Koos in front of the computer and Saul adding his comments where appropriate. Their familiarity with social networking sites and user generated content sites is assumed to be average for a typical undergraduate student.

Once logged in, secondary navigation* should be bigger and clearer, possibly in the form of 'tabs' so the user can tell which section they are in and where to click between sections more clearly. Secondary navigation should be a different colour to primary navigation*, to make it stand out more, or at least offer the user the option to change the colour of navigation bars independently from each other. Also secondary navigation should perhaps be below the header to separate it out from primary navigation.
Advanced search: ability to search / filter searches by event type/tag, and also to search by what degree people are taking, with an option to select from a list. Also the ability to search for society content was requested. This lead to a request for the possibility of a whole societies and activities section, and even ad hoc groupings, potentially in the format of a 'Groups and Societies' page, where students could receive updates about their societies specifically. It sounded to me as though this page would function in the same way as the Dashboard, but would make it easier to pick feeds from a list of societies.
Profile: The ability to choose a background picture and music was requested. Personally I'm not sure about this because images as backgrounds tend to distract from the content. This could be something we consider for the future. As to music, since last.fm have a radio player widget, we could provide a box for users to paste the code in for their last.fm radio station. This was deemed important in terms of personalising a profile.
Dashboard: The ability to have a feed made up of events which had been tagged with certain words was requested, so students could filter the information they received down to certain information which they would be interested in. This would be possible if the news/events system allowed tagging or categories, which it does hope to do in the future. This would bring in Union events assuming that the Union add all their events to the news/events system, as they can currently.
A feed with direct links to reading lists and J-store links suggested by your tutor was suggested. It was pointed out that there is already a feed option for links to each of your courses' syllabus pages in the Course Directory, which has reading lists there, e.g. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/americanstudies/syllabus/2007/V3029.html. However, the possibility of having direct links to library reading lists is being looked into.
The 'add widget' tab should be made bigger.
The term 'widget' needs to be explained.
A feed from the Badger (Union newspaper) would be useful. Looking on the ussu.info site, the pages where the Badger can be read don't appear to have a feed. The Union would have to request a feed from BAM Marketing for this part of their website.
Privacy: The issue of whether the University would be allowed to view 'private' posts made by students in a situation where a student is accused of misconduct needs to be clarified.

*'Primary navigation' for the sake of this report means University of Sussex website navigation i.e. Student web/ staff web/ my details/ community/ learning, whereas 'Secondary navigation' is referring to the second navigation bar which appears when you log in to Community - the Community sub-sections, i.e. Home | Dashboard | Profile etc.

The next step is to make changes to reflect input summarised above and to show the next version of the mock-up to the pilot groups. The project board are meeting tomorrow to discuss progress and next steps and any issues.

Usability tests run on mock up pages

2007-09-20T11:22:00.000+01:00

I created a number of 'mock-up' pages for SPLASH, which are mainly made up of flat images, made semi-interactive using Macromedia Flash. Each page I made is a different 'scene' in the Flash file, with a total of 15 scenes, as follows:

Community homepage (user logged out)
Advanced search page (user logged out)
Advanced search page (user logged in)
Community homepage (user logged in)
Dashboard
Add widget to your dashboard
Profile
Add widget to your profile
Friends
Classmates
Edit styles
Privacy
Blog
Student Web (logged out)
Student Web (logged in)

Strictly speaking, the two Student Web pages are not part of the SPLASH project - they were just made to show how a user might navigate into the Community from elsewhere on the Sussex Site. 'Student Web' is merely a suggested name for the student intranet homepage.

Community is a suggested name for the realisation of the SPLASH project. Designing how the SPLASH project will fit into the whole of the Sussex site will undoubtedly have an effect on how successful the project is. The University website is being re-designed concurrently with this project, so being able to influence decisions about the Sussex site as a whole is vital.

The usability tests were done on 3 people with little or no previous knowledge of the project. A minimal introduction was given to them:

SPLASH is the name of the project.When launched, it may have a different name.We’ve used ‘Community’ for the purpose of this pilot.

SPLASH is a place for students to bring together whatever web content they might already have into one place, and share it with their classmates, for example pictures on facebook, a blog on myspace, etc.

It is also a place for students to keep track of Study Direct learning forums, University and Student Union events, alongside updates from Facebook etc.

Some sections and functionality may not be in place yet, but please try and click everything you want to so we can see where a user would TRY to go.

The users were then asked to navigate through to each page listed above and ease or difficulty of navigation was noted.
Questions asked are as follows:

Community homepage (logged out)
What would you expect to see on this page?
Is it easy to spot where to log in?
Advanced search (logged out)
What else would you like the public to be able to search on?
Advanced search (logged in)
What else should University members be able to search on?

Dashboard
Which widgets should be default (standard ones which you start off with)?
Is it clear where to go to add widgets?
What do you think the purpose of this page is?
Dashboard – Add widgets
Is there anything else you would like to be offered?
Are any of the offered widgets useless?
Profile
How might a user change the profile header?
Is this clear?
How would a user change the style of this page?
Is this clear?
Is it clear how to add widgets to your profile?
Is it clear how to edit the privacy (visibility) settings of each widget?
Profile – Add widgets
Are there any other widgets we should offer?
Are any of these widgets useless?
Edit styles
Do you think header images should be chosen on this Edit Styles page, or as they are now (by clicking the headers themselves)?
How many styles should be offered to begin with?
Privacy
Should any other levels of privacy be available?
Does anything here not make sense?
Friends
Anything else needed here?
Should ‘latest photos from friends’ etc. be on the Friends page, or as they are currently (on the dashboard)? (Or both?)
Classmates
Anything else needed here?
Should ‘latest photos from classmates’ etc. be on the Classmates page, or as they are
currently (on the dashboard)? (Or both?)
Blog
Anything else needed?
Remove anything?
Are there enough privacy settings here?
General
Are titles clear and meaningful?
Does the navigation make sense?
Is it obvious what page you’re on?
How was the look and feel (style)?

These questions hoped to provide general feedback on the usability and also expected purpose of the project.

Elgg Jam 07 - Case Studies

2007-07-20T12:14:00.000+01:00

Last week was Elgg Jam at Brighton University - a look into social networking software ELGG. Here are my notes from the day.

Deshinder Gill - Using Blogs to stimulate creativity to support PDP
Deshi talked about using Elgg from a teacher's perspective. Personal Development Planning (PDP) was presented as a Student Profile. Students hate reflecting. To encourage them, video blogs were used. Students were expected to submit a blog/reflective review for each segment of a course. They didn't do it. They started submitting things when they were told what kind of things to say in each post.

There were uncertainties around privacy - students accidentally posted privately so tutors couldn't see the work. Students and tutors need time to learn how to use new technologies.

I wondered - can you export blogs from Elgg?

To post a blog to a community site, a user has to write the blog from the community page area, NOT from their usual blog area. I wondered - why not make it so the user writes all blogs from the same place, then chooses where they want to post it to (personal blog/community blog etc.)?

Sven Heising - Highly customised Elgg installations in Germany
Sven talked about extreme customisation of Elgg for a commercial social networking project.
This was very inspiring as they had done so much with Elgg and made it look very modern.

Features noted:

Rating system to get 'popular' blogs, photos and groups on to the homepage.
DASHBOARD which shows latest activity on your profile, your groups, friends etc. Shows last visitors to your profile. On their system it wasn't possible to personalise this page, but it would certainly be possible to develop it to do so.
'Flag as inappropriate' button on every page.
Used as a file management system - for photos, PDF, video, audio etc.
Integrated with content management system Typo3.
Uses smarty templates.

Karen Stepanyan - Teaching small groups with no-reply E-mails?
Karen spoke about how to increase use of a community by having subscriptions by default to all groups that members were a part of. This meant that they would get an email every time there was some activity in one of their groups. This encouraged people to take part in discussions on Elgg by reaching out to them through a mechanism they already used regularly (email).

Karen also spoke about how collaborative learning increases critical thinking and motivation, promotes openness and reduced competition. There are obvious benefits from 24 access to resources. He described Moodle as a place for structured resources, lead by tutors, and Elgg as a social software, open, and with student-lead resources.

He used google analytics to assess the success of Elgg, alongside questionnaires.

Inspired by the fact that Moodle emailing students when a post is made increased its use, he developed a subscription plugin for Elgg. This allows users to subscribe to communities and control what notification they get. By default, he subscribed all students to all communities (they could then opt-out). The increase in use correlated with this plugin implementation, but also correlated with a move to tightly integrate use of Elgg into course design (e.g. having assessed requirements for participation in community activities on Elgg), so it was difficult to tell how successful the subscription plugin was for increasing use.

Users also had the ability to subscribe to other users' activity.

It is possible to tweak the code of the plugin to only show friends and community memberships when choosing what to subscribe to (rather than all people/communities irrelevant of previous association).

The code is available at eduspaces.net/kstepanyan/files as well as an example screenshot of how the subscription administration works for the user.

Elgg Jam 07 - George Roberts

2007-07-20T12:06:00.000+01:00

George Roberts spoke about Elgg as the core of a community learning framework.

He talked about how there are no real discrete communities - there are communities of practice within communities within social networks. Scott Wilson defined the typology of communities based on practice, interest, action, purpose, circumstance and position. George said that in terms of structuring communities, it's a good idea to let community members set up structures themselves. They will need guidance, but don't decide which communities are needed, i.e. don't assume groups are needed for every union society. Don't assume groups are needed for every class. But DO provide a loose framework to nurture conversations.

Elgg doesn't do forums apparently (although there are some forums on the elgg.org site...). This shouldn't be a problem for SPLASH because there are external (and internal) forum systems in place which we could look at integrating with SPLASH (and not replacing).

Elgg Jam 07 - Ben Werdmuller

2007-07-20T10:23:00.000+01:00

Next up was Ben Werdmuller, who developed Elgg. His talk was on Bringing Social Networking To The Organisation.

With all the talk of democracy, it made me think that Elgg encourages an anarcho-syndicalist based community (which is a good thing in my opinion). Ben described Elgg as being organised around an 'organically created hierarchy, which is not top-down'. It is based largely around tagging, aiming to keep organisation simple across sections. There are lots of possibilities for collaboration.

I had a chat with Ben and he told me that it is possible (if the external API allows it) to bring in tags alongside content that is hosted externally. Of course, to bring in content from external sources, they must be externally public, even if they have privacy restrictions where you present them internally. A benefit of using an institutional aggregator / social networking system is that the institution and users keep their data (personal information). It is of course possible to export data when people leave, if it is set up correctly in the first place. Ben told me that even if you are importing content (e.g. from YouTube), it is still possible to have 'most popular video of the week' for example, on your front page.

The new version of Elgg (0.8) is integrated with Explode!. It also incorporates Open-ID.

Ben mentionned LEAP 2.0 which is related to ePortfolio. It seems the presentation tool within Elgg could serve as a portfolio tool.

Elgg 0.9 is going to have XML-RPC so you can tell flickr to post to Elgg. It will also have a 'stream of information', or 'activity feed', which shows activity from community members, similar to the News Feed on Facebook.

Elgg 1.0 should be coming out in about 6 weeks. It aims to address the problem of there being too many features which not everyone wants. It will be a stripped down version and everything else will be a plugin. This sounds closer to what we will want for SPLASH because we won't want to offer media uploads and it will be easier to more closely meet the requirements of the project if we start from more of a basic framework software.

Elgg Jam 07 - Stan Stanier

2007-07-20T09:57:00.000+01:00

The Brighton Experience - implementing Elgg on a University-wide basis

Brighton's implementation of Elgg is called Community@Brighton. It has its own branding and marketing, including merchandise, to appeal to students. I wondered - do students want it to look separate from the rest of the site? That is one point a Brighton student made to me - they found it confusing to have to use an apparently completely separate site from the rest of the Brighton University site.

Community@Brighton appears as a tab within Blackboard, with single sign-on.

It brings in XML feeds from MIS systems = the same feeds as go into Blackboard - so when a user is added to a group in Blackboard, they're automatically added in the Community.

The learning aspect was left for tutors to choose if they wanted to. They started off by pushing the social aspects. This became very good for student support, and therefore also student retention. An international student liaison officer ran a community.

Stan noted that people were partly disappointed with the image and video service of Elgg, as they were comparing the service to flickr and YouTube. I wondered then, why not just use flickr and YouTube?

Stan then presented a number of usage figures in comparison with Student Central (Blackboard?) usage figures. The general jist of the talk seemed to be to compare use of Blackboard or Community, rather than the integration between them.

Helpfully, Stan discussed some failures of the project. These included:

a 'for sale' board, possibly because everyone uses EBay.
The Union were not fully engaged with the project.
Staff were not fully engaged - there is currently no feed through to the staff intranet. It would be good to have latest posts fed through.
People set up communities and then abandoned them.
People don't notice tabs for navigation.
People don't understand their privacy control.

Advice for implementing was that there has to be lots of users from day one, and that you should expect everyone to hate it!

Stan noted that students lose their Elgg profiles and content when they leave the university. I'm quite sure that this would have a negative impact on uptake, because people don't want to waste their efforts putting content where it is not going to stay.

Tools we may wish to integrate with SPLASH

2007-06-18T11:42:00.000+01:00

SPLASH tools spreadsheet [28KB PDF]

This chart shows some of the tools we may wish to integrate with SPLASH in the first column in blue. In pink are the some example services which may provide some of the functionality we require already. The purpose of this chart is for comparison of what is out there and how integrated things are already. The totals aren't particularly useful because some things (in yellow) are pretty much obligatory for the project. For example, google homepage not being open source means we can't work with it. However, Wordpress mu not being integrated with Moodle doesn't rule it out because Wordpress mu is open source, so we may be able to make it integrate ourselves.

On the same basis, Elgg falls down in the fact that it has fewer plug-ins at the moment to integrate with other tools. This is not necessarily a problem because we would be able to create plug-ins specific to the tools we choose anyway.

Meetings with the pilot groups III

2007-06-13T16:03:00.000+01:00

Product Design
The latest meeting was with the third pilot group's tutor, Peter Childs. It was encouraging to hear that some of the current Product Design students are on Facebook, and I expect subsequent years to be even more engaged with social networks. The following points were raised during the meeting:

There is a risk of discussion/publishing tools we provide being used maliciously towards other students and/or staff.
The possibility of having a code of conduct will be looked into.
This is complicated by the fact that actual content may not be hosted by the University.
On a positive note, many students would benefit from being able to publish examples of their work in order to get constructive comments from other students, and also to display to potential employers/work placement providers.

Publishing work for the latter purpose, in the sense of a 'cv', would create an 'ePortfolio'. If students will want to use this for ePortfolio purposes, they will probably want to keep their pages after they leave the University. We will need to think about whether this is going to be possible.

I can imagine students' admin areas displaying a number of tabs for each of their pages, e.g. [dashboard] [personal] [academic] [professional] where the last three are editable profiles where students can put different kinds of content that they have created, and each of these profiles have different privacy settings, depending on the viewer.

[dashboard] - RSS feeds, timetable, friend updates etc. Visible only to that logged in profile owner.
[personal] - personal blog posts, photographs, videos, music taste, personal information. Visible to specifically chosen friends and/or classmates and/or anyone on campus and/or everyone.
[academic] - academic related blog posts, photographs of work, links useful to classmates. Visible to classmates and/or tutors
[professional] - cv, photos of projects, details of work done, goals etc. Visible to everyone.

That might end up being a bit complicated and overwhelming for the user to manage. Or it might be obvious.

'Homepage'

2007-06-05T15:16:00.001+01:00

Some things about the word 'homepage' have been making discussions about SPLASH a little confusing. A post by Karsten Lundqvist from the University of Reading prompted me to try to explain these.

The difference between NetVibes/Google homepage and what we're working on is based on the two uses of the word 'homepage'. It's confusing because 'homepage' can be used to mean the site which your browser opens up to when you start it, with information useful to yourself. In the case of Sussex students on campus computers, this would be the Information to Students page or the University homepage.

The other use of the term can mean a site all about yourself which is useful or interesting to others.

So NetVibes is a homepage which you'd want to start off from, like a portal, and we want to mix in the other use of the term homepage, i.e. to display personal information about 'me' to other people.

The two uses of the term homepage, if we want to incorporate both into SPLASH, may end up being split into sections, different tabs, or different pages altogether.

Other social networking sites have dealt with this by firstly having a 'dashboard', which is the portal a user sees when they are logged in, with the information useful to them. Dashboards aren't public so cannot be used to share information. Most social networking sites don't allow users to edit what comes up on their dashboard that much, possibly because the content is controlled by marketing. SPLASH hopes to allow users to choose what they want on their 'dashboard'. Sites that currently allow extensive editorial rights by the user (Netvibes/Google homepage) are built to be dashboards and nothing more - i.e. they are not part of any social network.

Secondly, many social networking sites pair up the dashboard with a public personal 'profile', which is made up of user-generated content about themselves and quite often highly editable by the user.

So, the term homepage, for purposes of the SPLASH project, may be used to include both a dashboard and a public/semi-public personal profile. It may be useful when discussing features for the project to define whether we're talking about features for the dashboard or the profile.

'Homepage' in Wikipedia

Meetings with the pilot groups II

2007-05-30T11:25:00.001+01:00

Students on the Social Work Foundation degree are also going to be involved as a pilot group. Tutor Cath Holmstrom seemed positive about the potential of blogs to aid learning. The following points were raised:

Some assignments involve 'reflective learning journals'. Blogs seem likely to be a suitable tool to aid this task.
Selected entries from these journals are handed in and assessed. It may be a useful feature for a blogger to be able to 'post to tutor' and have a drop-down menu of their tutors. Tutors would then be able to see these posts. Also the possibility of 'post to class' with a drop-down menu of classes being taken should be considered. There must be 'public'/'private'/'friends only'/'classmates only' levels of privacy.
There are around 50 first year social work students who currently use Moodle with great success. Many are mature students to whom the technology is often new, but this has not hindered the uptake of Moodle, as the tools seemed to fit their needs to a certain extent.
In the second year, many students take up off-campus placements. The ability to maintain communication between classmates during this time would likely benefit their studies and social lives.
Students do group projects and the forums on Moodle are useful for students to share resources and for tutors to track what work is being done. We should consider how we can integrate Moodle forums with SPLASH.
Tutors don't always want to be confronted with social discussions between students. From the tutor's point of view, it may be beneficial to only be able to see academic-related content.

Meetings with the pilot groups

2007-05-29T16:49:00.000+01:00

Today Tony and myself met first with the student union Gender Society and then with Social Work tutor, Cath Holmstrom.

Gender Society

The main request from the Gender Society is to have an area where users can share resources and information. del.icio.us was suggested as a possible tool for their needs, which could be incorporated into the project.
They are keen to have the organisation of the group decentralised, with a minimum hierarchy of management and administration.
They noted that some members may want their membership to be private.
They are keen to network with related groups, such as the LGBT and the Women's group. We suggested extending the pilot to these groups when we get to a usability testing point in the project.
They are keen to network with non-university groups and individuals. This means that at least some information should be accessible off-campus and unresticted.
They would like a 'restricted area' where members can discuss things privately. We noted that the current USSU forums may suit their needs, but we are currently unsure of the privacy of their forums. Privacy settings on Moodle forums may be easier to manage. They pointed out that forums/messageboards on Facebook are completely public, so not very suitable for their needs, as they would like the freedom discuss sensitive/personal issues anonymously. Whatever forum ends up being used, it should be possible to integrate it into the project in some way.
The group has, however, set up a Facebook profile but is concerned about the public listing of members. It does not currently have a Myspace profile. Its main communication is via an emailing list to which all members can post.
They felt little need for blogging but acknowledged that others may feel differently.
In respect to personal pages, the ability to track who has been viewing your profile was suggested as a feature.

Minutes from the meeting with Cath to be posted tomorrow.

Stage 1: Analysis and Design

2007-05-21T16:25:00.000+01:00

Due to the late recruitment of the Client Manager/Developer, the project initiation stage completion was delayed by 3 weeks.

On to Stage 1: Analysis and Design.
System Analysis should be from 2 April 2007 to 27 July 2007. A lot of this has been happening informally anyway.

Here's the plan for the system analysis:

Make a list of components we want to integrate with, e.g. Flickr. Split this into 'must-haves' and 'might haves'.
User needs analysis - talk to pilot groups. Think about whether we'll need to extend the pilot to other student union groups in order to support a 'community'. 2 meetings are planned for 29th May 2007.
Create some dummy sites for small scale usability testing (front end).
Create some dummy sites for user admin pages.
Think about how it will link in with Study Direct - talk to Paolo and Carol.
Put the list of components alongside a list of general features (e.g. permissions, custom layout etc.). Create a spreadsheet of these, to compare different possible backbone systems, e.g. Elgg, wordpress etc.

Blogger templates

2007-05-09T21:12:00.000+01:00

This is the first post of the SPLASH blog. I'm just posting to see how a post fits into the Sussex theme I am creating.

I also accidentally 'flagged' my own blog as 'objectionable' while switching tabs. While looking to find out how to 'un-flag' your blog, I discovered this is a common occurrence. Note to self: don't put buttons that do irreversible things so close to the top of the window!

*edit*
Here is the template file I'm using as of 13/06/2007. The only bug I've found which I can't fix yet is that when you do a small post, the post footer drops below all the content in the left hand column.

Sussex blogger template [30KB XML]