rose.pruyne

The following series of videos are of an informal usability study that I conducted using plone.org as the subject. These videos were captured using Camtasia screen recorder... Part I: Introduction Part II: The Usability Study Part III: Some Observations

Pick a higher education Web site. Any higher education Web site. Likely what you've got is the agglomerated result of battling needs, wants, and not a little politics.

Here's one that's been buzzing around universities for the past several years: The desire to make the Web presence and brochures look like "a family of publications." always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web Branding and consistency. These are the given reasons. Okay, there's nothing wrong with branding. Nor is there anything wrong - actually a lot right - about instilling a level of consistency across all facets of public communications, both online and in print. Or the uniform design and navigation of Web pages across a site. Unfortunately the "family of publications" notion is frequently misinterpreted to mean that Web sites should take on the design characteristics brochures as well as regurgitating their content - a misunderstanding promulgated by those who understand print publications but not the Web. And then, consistency becomes the hobgoblin. Some words of advice to those who push the concept to this point: Bro...

Just when I was hoping for a resurgence of flaming skulls...

I recently heard tell of the following activity, parading as content migration to an enterprise level content management system. I am not making this up: Copy large volumes of Web-content-to-be, page by page, into separate Dreamweaver files containing the design (created and sliced up in FireWorks) Copy/paste said Dreamweaver files into content wells of the content management system Repeat this activity ad infinitum until an entire Web presence is constructed in this fashion always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web When I heard this, something inside me snapped. Aside from the stunning inefficiency inherent in creating all these disparate Dreamweaver files, this activity points to a fundamental lack of understanding of what exactly a content managment system is. In the interest of quelling this misunderstanding in others, here follows a list of what not to do with a CMS: Dump a bad Web site into a good CMS. If your organization's Web presence is a ...

Originally published on August 28, 2006 I appreciate how Facebook has enabled me to connect with colleagues, and (younger) family members in a manner that is both informative and expressly cordial. It attracts students like Nutella attracts chocolate lovers, and because of that, I see interesting potential here. In fact, one of our faculty members at Penn State plans to try running his human-computer interaction course through Facebook this fall . Definitely worth pursuing.