As another video production training opportunity ‘How to get your message across using video’ has come to a close this week,  we are delighted to bring the second issue of Digital Digest: Spotlight on video but before you start planning your Oscar speech – we show how it pays to ask yourself some key questions.

The thing that I have taken away from this course that I will keep coming back to is the importance of getting your story across so that your audience engages with what you have to say.

The team delivering the course are keen to stress that technical brilliance in editing is all well and good, but if the subject matter is not video worthy – not interesting, compelling or engaging enough – then it’s not going to be watched.

The camera is a gun

Remember that the camera’s not a hoover. It’s a gun. These wise words changed the way I thought about filming. It’s vital to first work out what the ‘story’ that you’re trying to tell is – whether your video is a promotional film to recruit students, disseminating research findings, or for teaching and learning. Then, by planning your shots accordingly, you not only save yourself time and effort in the editing process, but also keep the message clear and increase the impact of the finished video. You can then add the final polish around these core elements in a way that will enhance rather than detract from your message.

The evidence?

As part of the course, I worked with Robyn to create a video that promotes the course. Robyn’s finished video is below and gives you an idea of what can be achieved on this two-day course. What story do you have to tell?

Having content on the web is great, but having loads of content on the web poses a number of problems.Firstly, there is the issue of keeping it up to date. When there’s a lot of content to check and maintain, it takes a lot of work to keep up with it – and the people doing it often don’t have much time to spare.

Secondly, it can make it more difficult for our users to find what they’re looking for as search terms are diluted and bloated site structures mean that they have to wade through a lot of content to get to the one nugget of information that they’re actually looking for.

So what can we do to solve these problems? One approach is to do a full content audit (I’ll be going into more details about content audits in a later post), but these can be time-consuming. There are, however, a few quick fixes that you can do to improve things in the short term:

1. Cut down your content. There’s a great temptation to put EVERYTHING online, but take a minute to think about what you actually want your website to do. If it’s to attract students to your courses, encourage research funders, or get people to sign up for a conference, you only really need to include information that helps your audience to make their decision and to complete the action you want them to take. Consolidate, condense and if needs be – delete. By ‘trimming the fat’ you make it easier for your users to find the content that’s relevant to them and complete their task – meaning more students/funding/delegates for you! Just make sure that you’re removing any links to content that no longer exists as you go.
2. Check it’s up to date. If you’ve got a load of old content on your site, it’s not only taking up valuable real estate, but is misleading to your users. It’s likely to be better to have no information that incorrect information, so if you don’t have the time to update it just yet then chop it out. Remember though, that if your users need this information, they’re going to get it from somewhere, so make some time in your diary to create an updated version to prevent unwanted phone calls and emails.
3. Check it’s clearly labelled. By making sure that the page titles, headers and descriptions (editable in the page properties in the CMS) are clear, that the text that links to pages makes sense and you have sub-headers breaking up your content where appropriate will go a long way to helping your users find the content they need and will also boost your searchability by improving your SEO.
4. Check you’re not saying the same thing elsewhere. Make sure that you’re not duplicating information that can be found elsewhere on the University website. Where relevant, add links to other page, rather than repeating verbatim. If you do need to repeat content, use shared sections to pull the content through, so it only needs to be updated in one place. If your users require bespoke information, then make sure that it is bespoke and meeting their needs, rather than a rehash of the general info. Doing this will yourself work in the long run as there will be fewer places you’ll need to update content when things change.

These are a few ‘quick and dirty’ tips that can help you to trim your content and make it easier for your users to find what they’re looking for. For more information, there’s a great article on deciding what to cut on the Meet Content blog, which is focused on higher education websites. I’ll also be posting some tips on what to consider when you’re creating new content in the near future, as well as more on content audits later in the year.

Happy New Year from the Digital Development team!

But to make this newsletter a success, we need your input. Here’s a list of topics for future issues which we already know you are interested in:

• Screencasting/podcasting
• Endnote
• Blogs and social media
• E-books
• QR codes
• Copyright
• Diary management
• Digital photography
• CMS
• Google Docs

If you are working on anything interesting that you would like to share, or if you would like to suggest a topic, get in touch via digitaldigest@reading.ac.uk.

One of the big projects I was involved in this year was the revamp of the International Study and Language Centre (ISLC) website.

This came about because the department felt that the site simply wasn’t serving the needs of their users. Organisational restructuring and changes to the department’s offer had resulted in various elements being tacked on to the site, making it difficult for prospective student to find what they needed.

The approach involved first identifying the objectives of the department and what they were actually trying to do. It was decided that the core objective was to recruit more students, as well as to raise the unit’s reputation among their other prospective audiences. The next step was to speak to the users to find out what they wanted from the site. While the user testing provided some useful insights, as we only had access to existing students, rather than prospective ones, there were still some gaps in our knowledge. I decided to supplement our understanding by asking the course tutors, who know their students inside out, to complete some personas for the target audience. Personas are brief outlines of typical users that you can use to evaluate your content. See an example of a completed persona or download the persona template for Word.

Armed with all this info, we put together a list of what users wanted to find out from the website, the kind of tasks that they need to complete and the information that they need in order to do this. This informed the information architecture and what we know about the users informed the voice, tone and language used. The result was a site that tries to take into account the limited language ability of the target audience and gently guide them to the course that’s right for them. Once they’ve found the right course, the information is structured to present them with the barriers to entry first, so they know whether or not they’re eligible immediately, then the ‘softer’ information to help them decide if this is the right course for them. They are then led towards the ultimate goal – application. The rest of the site was reworked too, streamlining the content and aiming to highlight relevant content to the target audiences using terms that they will be familiar with.

Visit the ISLC website to see the changes for yourself and feel free to leave your comments and questions below. We’ll review the stats and do a follow up piece later in the year when we’ll have a better idea of whether or not the changes have proven successful.

This post is part of the Digital Development Forum Christmas Catchup

Members of the Digital Development team have written individual posts covering their area, so I’ll let them tell their own stories.

Andy Owen’s end-of-year round-up is especially poignant because he’s leaving the University and moving on to pastures new in the New Year. You’ll see from his blog post what a fantastic talent he is, and – although we’re very sad to see him go – we wish him all the best for the future.

Looking to next year, the Digital Development team will be finishing working on a project which had the aim of ‘kick-starting’ the internationalisation of our digital presence. That ties in with a project we are just beginning: to redevelop our online recruitment information across the Study and Life sections, school and department pages, and third party websites. As well as improving the ‘customer journey’, we will also be looking to improve the processes involved in publishing course information. This work will be one of our priorities over the remainder of the 2012-13 academic year (watch this space for updates!).

Because digital development at the University is about so much more than the work of the Digital Development team, we are launching the Digital Digest newsletter to bring all the University’s digital news together. You will be able to read summaries of digital developments taking place across the University and beyond. Links in the newsletter will take you straight to a relevant blog post where you can read all the details, written by the person or team responsible.

If you are one of those people or teams, and you have a story to tell that will inspire others, or some good practice to share with your peers, then please get in touch! You can either leave feedback and comments on the various blog posts, or you can write your own blog post and ask digitaldigest@reading.ac.uk for your story to be featured in an upcoming edition of the Digital Digest newsletter.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Three new developments which allow staff in Schools to record key information on RISIS for their students.

Create your own placement opportunity records on RISIS, via the RISISweb portal. Code them however you like, since they’ll have a 2-character prefix unique to your School/Dept. You can also set up placement contacts. Once the basic structure is in place, you can attach students directly to those placements or make the records available to your students for them to apply for a placement. Before the student goes on placement, you can attach the documentation for health & safety and risk assessment to the placements.

Communication logs are accessed from the tutor card (for undergraduates and postgraduate taught students) or the research hub (for research students). It allows you to view key communications or interactions between the University and the student, where these have been generated from RISIS. This is a new feature, so its use will build up over time.

A record of personal tutorial meetings can also be created from the tutor card or the research hub. Click the button to view existing records or set up a new one. If you want simply to log the fact of the meeting, enter the date. If you want to record a summary of the discussion, you can do so, and you might then wish to invite the student to comment on the summary. The School administrator and Senior Tutor can view the existence of the meeting record, plus summary, but they are not accessible to any other staff, so the summary will remain confidential between the tutor and tutee.

You may have noticed that the University of Reading’s home page underwent a bit of a change recently. Gone are the bold colours all competing equally (and so equally unsuccessfully) for our attention. In its place we have a page with more focus: its primary objectives are student recruitment and promoting the University’s activities.

The old University of home page lacked hierarchy and had many elements competing equally for attention. By contrast the course finder search box was quite anonymous and often missed by users.

The redesigned University home page is focussed on student recruitment and promoting the University’s activities. Here the course finder search box is now much more prominent, and has seen increased usage.

To reach this focus we needed to first understand the goals of both our users and the organisation.

User needs

A lot can be gleaned from analytics data. It is great at showing trends – for example the majority of visitors to the University’s home page go directly to course and course-related information. However, it was through talking to current students about their process when applying to university, and observing them search for information on a given course, that we could better understand their behaviour and uncover specific problems. All clicked through several pages to find the given course, rather than using the course finder search box, which would have resulted in a much shorter pathway.

This identifies two things:

• Finding course and course-related information is the number one priority for the majority of visitors coming to the website via the home page.
• If we want to encourage visitors to use the course finder search box (since relabeled Find your subject) as a shortcut to finding course information, it needs to feature more prominently on the home page.

Organisational needs

The University of Reading’s home page gets more traffic than any other page on the website. It is a highly visible platform from which to promote the University’s activities (from league table rankings, to upcoming open days and high profile research), and presents a great opportunity to reinforce the public image of the University’s mission: as an institution that educates talented people well and conducts outstanding research.

And as a large organisation, the University has many stories to tell. Often at the same time.

From this we are able to develop two further requirements:

• To present headline information from a range of sources (including news, events, and highlights from Henley and Malaysia).
• To be able to simultaneously feature several high profile activities and achievements.

Flexibility

Knowing our requirements provides a solid foundation on which to base the design of the page, and allows us to focus on what matters most. The inclusion of a large slideshow is grounded in the need to simultaneously feature several of the University’s high profile activities and achievements.

A number of other home page redesigns have benefited greatly from this needs- or task-led approach: Research, Institute of Education, History and Food Security. Each has been tailored to a unique set of requirements, aimed at fulfilling the specific needs of that department and its respective audiences. By stepping away from implementing features for features-sake we also avoid the proliferation of sameness through cookie-cutter design.

These projects demonstrate that when motivated by a combined understanding of user and organisational needs, there is flexibility within both the brand and the content management system (CMS) to create more useful and usable websites.

The new Research home page shares a common slideshow element with the University’s home page. It has been included to profile key areas of research.

Future friendly

The University has seen a big shift in the way in which people access the website. In October 2010 traffic from mobile phones and tablets stood at around 15,000 visits a month. By October 2012 this had risen nearly ten-fold, to over 130,000 visits a month, and now equates to approximately 10% of all traffic on the site. Equally significant is the range of devices being used to access the website – 475 different models of mobile phone and tablet. This changing pattern of interaction is replicated across the web.

The changes in the technology used to access to the University website, and the new habits this brings, has created an additional requirement for recent projects – to be mobile ready now and future friendly enough to remain usable in a landscape of increasingly fragmented platforms.

Today a visit to most pages on the University website using a mobile phone or small tablet will result in a frustrating experience: you need to zoom in, and then scan across and down the page the find what you are looking for. If the site is unfamiliar it is easy to lose track of where you are on the page’s canvas.

To be mobile ready, or more accurately: to be device agnostic, was an important criteria for the redesign of both the University and Research home pages (as well as this blog). The layout of these pages adapts to make better use of the available screen size – big or small – while elements such as the menu collapse down to reduce their on-screen footprint for the smallest screens.

The layout of the University home page adapts to different screen sizes. Here you can see how it adapts to suit the screen size of an iPhone and an iPad.

This is just the start. Further improvements will be made as design patterns are established and people’s expectations of using the web on a small screen become more concrete.

Further improvements

The University of Reading home page project isn’t just a redesign; it is an ongoing exercise in self-improvement. The latest figures indicate that the redesign has had a positive impact, though further analysis is needed to identify the strengths and weaknesses. As we learn more about how visitors access the University website and use the home page, it will be refined further. The website is a product that is never finished.

The Development and Alumni Relations office re-organised their homepage menus in August 2011, after using Google Analytics to determine which pages proved the most popular.  This was compared against a list of requirements that the office wanted to convey to Alumni.

We reduced the number of sub-menus, re-arranged and renamed the main menu items to give clearer indication of what is within the sections and introduced direct links to specific pages from the homepage.

Comparing the results of our website usage after a year, it can be seen that the number of visits has increased by 74.13% and the number of pages viewed by 30.38%.  This is more likely to be a result of increased communication about our site rather than a direct result of the menu redesign.

However, looking at the no of pages viewed per visit and the bounce rate, it is clear that people are looking at fewer pages.  This is probably a combination of factors, such as viewers directly linking to newsletter articles, but also viewers being able to visit the correct page within fewer clicks.

Two key messages that were trying to convey was to make the alumni events calendar easier to get to (it used to require three clicks, now only one) and improving the number of people who visit the Make a gift page.  The events calendar is now the 7^th most popular page and the number of Make a gift page views increased by 166%.

Going forward, we are left with the following conclusions:

1)      Our home page is not even in the top 10 most viewed pages anymore.

2)      The Log in screen is the most popular page, so this needs to become our homepage.

3)      A lot of screen space is given to fundraising sections, but they have a very low view rate (content doesn’t change, no traffic directed to this area).  We will need to think about how this can be improved.

4)      Newsletter stories and Guest Lists are increasing popular landing pages.  We need to do more to improve links to other pages from these pages.

Helping an academic in Modern languages with a blog to show the outcomes of a research project and its impact.

France under allied attack between 1940-1945

Working with Professor Andrew Knapp – Professor of French Politics and Contemporary History who was looking for a way to convey the output of research on the “France under allied attack between 1940-1945”

The project required a large number of images with descriptive text and acknowledgement of the image owners to be displayed in an “online exhibition”. Another objective was to showcase the work to the public as means of capturing impact for the REF (Research Excellence Framework).

After discussing a couple of the options such as Flickr as a means to present the work we agreed creating a blog would be the best option delivering the following benefits:

• Ease of use and navigation for users
• Simplicity to update and maintain
• Categorise work into key groups
• Tag the images appropriately to display a tag cloud
  • This had the additional outcome of showing which areas and years were more prevalent in the blog than others.
  • Present the research outcomes to as wide an audience as possible
  • Allow the option for users to comment on images and debate
  • Have space for descriptive text to accompany the images
  • Reference the image owners

Since the blog has gone live we have deployed google analytics to monitor hits to the site as well as added Andrew’s “bombing talk” podcast .

The beauty of using a blog for this piece of work has been to deliver all the functionality above, keep within branding guidelines while present an interesting and high quality product.

Managing a successful project to improve the History website

After being approached by Associate Dean in Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Science to improve the History website, promoting its strengths towards maximising under and postgraduate recruitment.

After meeting with History staff to identify the unique selling points and opportunities within the department and marrying this up with the need and demand from students, we were able to put a plan in place to improve the content and visual identity of the site.

Our design officer met with a selection of staff and students in a focus group to identify top tasks in order to improve the homepage and navigation from it.

Improvements included:

• Revamped front page representing the top tasks of students
• Improved page content showing USP’s of the department, employability of students, placements etc.
• Blog feed to replace news, events, conferences and opinion pieces
• Enhanced staff profiles and publications list
•  Revised images throughout to support the content.
• 

Finally we produced a comprehensive sustainability plan for staff to manage the site going forward.

Feedback from staff on the impact of the project has been very positive.

Advice and guidance to lots of groups and individuals on various subjects

This year we also have make progresses on supporting mobile app development, podcast and the creation of several eNewsletters.

Several Di@l sessions to supporting a wide variety of university colleagues on project ranging from presenting research data, marketing departmental skills, social media advice and many more.