Archive for the 'information management' Category

Statto..

Published on September 13, 2007 in information management and JISC. 1 Comment

Stuart over at OSS Watch recently wrote a post about how OSS Watch measure ‘buzz’ around there activities.  This sent me off on a little bit of a tangent as I started to give a little thought to the tools we use at JISC to monitor the impact of our website (and when I say we I still mainly mean Kerry!)

We make pretty extensive use of Google Analytics to monitor the JISC website and especially to track trends in popular topics and spikes in activity.  We also back this up with a desktop application called Absolute Log Analyzer Professional
that we use to analyse the raw log data files that Eduserv supply us.  This is mainly used to track downloads (still a major element of the JISC website for better or worse) and to sense check the results from Analytics.

Alongside this we also make use of Feedburner to track subscriptions to our RSS feeds - since they were purchased by Google many of the previously premium options have become free so we are looking into these tools as well and we use the backlink tool from the Google Webmaster toolset to see who is linking to us…oh and finally, lest I forget, we also generate stats from our Google Mini search appliance to help improve our internal search results.

All this information is about how people are using our site but we also try to track what people are saying about us as well.  Like Stuart we use Google Alerts and also saved searches as RSS feeds at both Technorati and Google Blog Search to see who is taking JISCs name in vain most recently.

Well what are we doing with all this information I hear you ask (well no I don’t but I’m going to answer it anyway!) All the usage data feeds in to our ongoing work on trying to improve the user experience of the JISC website.  The relaunch of the site was always seen as an opportunity to get us to a point where we had a stable enough foundation to really start to try and make some radical improvements to the usability of the site.  This has been a little slower than we had hoped (the usual financial, resourcing and priority hurdles) but we are again picking up momentum as we hit this new academic year and hope to make some real headway in a number of areas in the next six-nine months.

The other information is less well used - JISC has not wholly bought in to the need to engage in the conversation online yet - despite my quiet urging.  Some have started to embrace it but generally it is slow going.  I firmly believe however that it is a direction we should be going in and will continue to do all I can to encourage others.

 

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The Persona Touch

Published on August 30, 2007 in information management and JISC. 1 Comment

I buy into the concept of usability..I mean who doesn’t these days to some extent.  I budget for usability work on every web project I work on - big and small…for years I was a devout follower in the Cult of Jakob (though I think he has lost touch with the real world these days..)  I love being behind the two-way mirror at user tests and watching the eye-tracking tools do there thang…I am a believer…except…I just don’t get the concept of personas something about it all just makes me think of slick-suited ad-men rather than the t-shirts and trainers world of the web!

I don’t care if my users eat organic food, watches Newsnight and read Guns’n'Ammo - honestly how does it help? Maybe in an e-commerce environment but we don’t sell stuff - its all free (well if you take out the whole taxpayer issue!)..

BUT (and its a J-Lo sized butt!)

I do need to understand more about the audience of the JISC website.  Who uses it, why they use it, how they use it… we regularly get requests to build in paths through the site based on audiences or tasks..the problem is that despite all our stats [and thanks to Kerry we have mountains of data these days] we still don’t really understand our audience(s) and are probably going for a one-size fits all technique that isn’t really comfortable for anyone..

So will personas help?  I’m still not convinced but need to try something - if it could be a bit more focussed - less of the fluffy marketing babble and more analysis then maybe..I want to know if we have gaps in our content and if so what are they and I really want to know if we are just in one big echo chamber at the moment - JISC folk talking to JISC folk - because if thats the case then we took a misstep somewhere (and I think big parts of it is and we have)

Anyway one way or another I am going to look into audience research in the coming months - maybe someone can convince me of the worth of personas or point me at a technique that fits better with my mind-set…we’ll see.

Everything is (not quite) miscellaneous

Published on August 27, 2007 in information management, web 2.0 and JISC. 1 Comment

David Weinbergers new book definitely brings out my inner librarian but while I generally have enjoyed it [despite its massively geeky nature] I’m not sure I 100% agree with some of its major points [plus it good be a bit shorter - it kind of runs out of steam]

While I do agree that tagging is a great concept and that there is a genuine need [and demand] to find and use more flexible ways of organising information online - completely user generated tagging only really seems to work if you have an audience large and engaged enough to really add value..it works fine on sites like Flickr and Delicious but there seems to be pretty major diminishing returns when its used on other sites and its a risky navigation strategy on its own certainly..

Increasingly though standard information architecture [which I have spent the best part of ten years studying!] seems limited and restricting and in this Google age people turn more and more to search as their first option ahead of browsing which in some way lessens the experience for the user.

Maybe some kind of tagging is the answer but I think it needs to do more than it currently offers.

JISC is funding a couple of pieces of work in this area including Enhanced Tagging at UKOLN and Rich Tags by mSpace at Southampton Uni, both are seeking to add value to the concept of tagging and sync some of the more Web 2.0 concepts with the idea(l)s of the JISC Information Environment and Repositories.

Its the Rich Tags project that really interests me. I think its an interesting way of adding more value to the idea of tagging and sits somewhere between some kind of traditional cataloger task and the open social tagging of something like Flickr. It is also working on a way of actually implementing the system on third party websites and repositories.

Recent usability work on the JISC website has [not for the first time!] highlighted the need for new routes through the site - based on terminology and topics more familiar to our users than our internal terms [believe it or not we have been really trying to do this for a while now!] and maybe tagging is something that can help with that..we’ll see but I have high hopes that something like the mSpace work will be useful..