Author: Joseph Dickson

Joseph Dickson is a front-end web developer with experience building higher education websites using ClassicPress, WordPress, and Drupal.

How do I wrangle this UX thing?

Notes from the WP CAMPUS live stream.

Robin Smail | Session Information | Penn State

The Basics

What is UX?

User experience (UX), encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interaction with a company, services, and its products. Not just the digital aspects.

Using a hotel booking experience as an example.

reservation process, customer service, room size, cleanliness etc.

UX Design: if visual design is about designing how the product looks then user experience design is the entire human experience with.

User interface design (UI), pieces you make a choice to put on the screen. Toggle, pulldown, text field, check box, radio box.

Why do we care?

Short answer: Easier products to use get used so you can move onto your next task.

When focusing on UX enables the design to focus on the user.

Humans have always been emotional and have always reacted to the artifacts in their world emotionally.

Alan Cooper, President of Cooper

The Daily Grind

Works with Developer and a Designer. The UX designer is the glue that holds things together. The UX designers skills overlap with the other two a little.

Things a UX designer might work on…

  • User research
  • user personas
  • user stories
  • wireframes
  • protoytypes
  • user testing
  • visual design
  • user interface
  • information architecture
  • user interaction design
  • accessibility
  • usability

Different users have different expectations so its important to test and prototype.

What do employers want?

Unicorns!

Ridiculous job descriptions that want everything at all times all day in one person.

MOAR Unicorns!

Some can’t even decide what their “unicorn” is made of…

So many damn buzzwords! in job descriptions. There are no UX unicorns. You need a UX designer in a team with great designers and developers. One person can’t do the job of an entire team.

No. Seriously, give me five things they want in a junior designer.

What are hiring managers looking for?

  • communication
  • learning and challenges
  • initiative
  • creativity
  • portfolio

You will not recognize UX until its really bad. Such as hitting the wrong button all the time. This requires extra time learning the backwards way of using something. UX designers have to know that they are designing for other people… not themselves. Such as making a chocolate cake for someone’s birthday only to discover they’re allergic to chocolate.

Getting there from here

  1. Read and research.
    1. a book apart
    2. steve croog, don’t make me think, it’s not rocket surgery
      1. Take one day a month to look at something as a user
    3. Understand the difference between UX and UI. Understand the role of UX in business
  2. Get to know UX Workflow
  3. Ideate a solution
  4. Test your design on users, gather feedback, make corrections, test more
  5. Develop and execute
  6. Play with the tools of the UX trade
    1. User research
    2. Wireframing
    3. Prototyping
    4. Project Management
    5. Communications
    6. Brainstroming
  7. Take a course
    1. Learning by doing.
      1. Boot camps
      2. Workshops
      3. Design
  8. Get inspired
    1. Visit sites
    2. Bookmark sites for reference
  9. Build your portfolio

Tips

Don’t forget to include examples of parts of the UX workflow… even the bad ones. the process matters

Network with other professionals

  • Slack lurking, professional organizations etc.

Connect the dots: bridging silos of information

Notes from the livestream of WPCAMPUS 2019

Elaine Shannon | Session

Elaine is a web developer for St. Marys University who loves to look at the whole picture. She specializes in designing and building solutions that work well for both end users and the people who maintain the web.

stmarytx.edu/silos

github.com/eshannon3/

Who in the audience is an introvert

  • Who is afraid of public speaking?
    • Encourage others to speak and share their knowledge

What we’re talking about today

Background, Examples, Tips

Background

St Mary TX uses a WP site and focuses on prospective students other audiences such as Alumni and Students use all sorts of other services and sites to meet the needs of their communities.

Early on their website was PHP and eventually moved to WP, the functionality didn’t change much until they moved to a managed webhost.

Challenge: Silos

Faculty and Staff directories were disconnected. used JSON to export information from “Banner” system so it can be structured and parsed to another server.

How the directory works

Cron job checks for new information periodically every hour and refreshes the JSON feed to the live website.

Uses REST API to grab faculty blog posts.

Uses arrays to merge banner and faculty data that they want on the new website. They plan to strip out email addresses in the future to limit phishing attempts.

WordPress to WordPress integration

RSS integrations was used before REST API and could be customized to fetch information. RSS feeds didn’t offer the featured image so they parsed the first image in the page.

REST API offers more tools within the publishing process. Images, fallbacks, text and tweaks.

Silos of information can get ugly, the process will go through iteration. Analytics are helpful in researching change. Look for a high rate to prioritize change.

APIs helped build a logical calendar that users would be comfortable using. stmartx.edu/events

Better markup SEO display events in a friendly list in Google results.

Parsing data helped organize it and pull up schedule information for visitors to the website.

Tips

  1. Focus on users, journeys and search terms to identify trouble spots.
  2. Don’t duplicate content… Seriously, don’t.
  3. Find keys to connect silos reliably.
  4. Look for APIs they tend to be well structured.
  5. Make friends, offer help, ask for help

The care and feeding of collections management

Notes taken from the live stream of WPCampus

Speaker: Pam Patterson
Session Information
Digital Technologist at Yale

Various tools and alternatives mentioned for digital asset management and alternatives. Unfortunately I closed the window and much of my notes. So there’s a preview of using WP for notes and relying on the autosave feature 🙂

WordPress as a DAM is tricky. Plugins, Themes and webhosts need to be maintained. Every element could go defunct over time. As a result keep backups of your raw content just in case you need to start over at some point.

For example the site at Crossroads of Hope and Despair has gone through host and url name changes over the last several years.