resume
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This project is the one (aside from my personal site) in which I have been involved longest. It is also the project which has afforded me the most valuable lessons in site development, improvement, and management.
The ITweb project was begun shortly before I arrived at the University's Information Technology Division in 1996. The team had done an admirable job with the few hours per week they were given, but now ITD wanted to make the site fully functional. The New GoalsSuch a site, we concluded, should provide 24-hour information about our hundreds of products and services, offer product/service-specific as well as general computing tutorials, give access to troubleshooting information, supply the latest news about the computing environment, and even allow users to conduct transactions related to their computing accounts.My role throughout has been to work with a planning team but to handle most of the operational work. Today our team consists of a project leader, a system administrator/programmer, a graphic designer, and three to four members of ITD's Marketing and Technical Communications group. Rendering the Complex AccessibleOne of the greatest challenges we encountered with ITweb was to convey sensibly the complexity and ever-changing facets of ITD. ITD provides a wide variety of services:
Many of these products and services combined to form the functions users wanted. For example, if a user wanted to read e-mail from their off-campus apartment, they needed to purchase a modem (and possibly a computer), obtain and configure our Internet access software, sign up for dial-in service, and learn how to dial in. The individual services' had subsites which could provide bits of the information. ITweb's job was to guide the user through the process as a whole. In addition, while ITD was the main IT provider on campus, there were others dedicated to specific groups. The task was to give visitors as much cross-ITD product/service assistance as we could in an integrated way, and then funnel them to their departmental IT units when needed. Understanding and Improving the User ExperienceITD had long sought to know its users, but it had few measures in place with which to gather feedback. To gain the user perspective, we undertook a series of focus groups to gain insight into what users wanted from our site.After we had undertaken a revision of the site to incorporate many of those desires, we found that there were usability problems which hindered the site's use. We had our site reviewed by the leading information architecture firm, Argus Associates. Then we researched, developed, and employed a testing process to determine problems, and made many fixes. Today, we have reduced the necessary testing to smaller features-based tests, though we are committed to resuming full-scale testing if our user feedback channels indicate it is needed again. We have strived throughout the course of the site's development to keep our site accessible to all of our audience. To that end, we have long employed coding which was accessible to disabled visitors as well as to all versions of all the major browsers, including Lynx. However, to accomplish this, we have had to forgo the luxuries of many of the more cutting-edge Web technologies. As our audience becomes more sophisticated and upgrades to the version3 and 4 browsers, we are now exploring carefully some newer techniques. Umbrella/Subsite RelationshipsThe site consists of a set of umbrella pages which provide access to various ITD subsites. Due to the nature of ITD and U-M, the umbrella team has very little authority to direct subsites' architecture or look and feel. Because of this, we have to design our look and feel to be as accommodating of the subsites' designs as possible.In 1998, ITweb established an implementation team which includes stakeholders from most subsites. This group has succeeded in fostering good relationships between the umbrella team and subsite teams. We have jointly created a set of ITD Web Page guidelines, a task thought impossible only a few years ago. What was once a cowboy atmosphere is becoming a shared project with shared ends in mind.
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