From Concepts to Relevant Examples

This discussion explores how our portal design may be dependent on the models we have of our potential users and the uses, including, technology-, management-, and user- driven models.

Portal Information Architecture

To manage the portal’s complexity in some sort of hierarachy, our Pageflakes mockup thus far groups our various services

Why should the FU offer blogging services?

Here I’d like to list the reasons we have discussed thus far and invite commentary as it will cost resources to install and maintain a blogging application on our servers.

Diagramming Deployment Possibilities

To help us model our potential user implementations of blogs (and for that matter, portals), we discussed today the use of the diagram entitled “Deployment Possibilities of Corporate Blogs” found in the Deutsche Bank Research report, “Blogs: The new magic formula for corporate communications?“

Portal Group Discussion of 2.8.06

This article reviews our small group discussion of 2 August 2006 and where we discussed problems of determining user needs, Ahmet’s Pageflakes mockup, problems of access, services, priorities, technologies, and user groups

RSS Feed Readers, a listing of web-based services and cross-platform applications

This RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators Directory includes brief descriptions and links to many readers/aggregators. I haven’t tested them all, but based on the advice of others I have tried a few, and my favorites are the built-in aggregator in the new browser FLOCK and Blogbridge.

Modeling our Portal Users

Here’s a short article, “Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites“, explaining how to build “personas”, hypothetical users, that we might use when modeling our portal users. The article outlines the key terms of Alan Cooper’s pioneering work on personas, including, how one might go about imagining and then verifying behavior patterns, technical skills, generalizing on persons you know, etc., as the basis for developing interfaces and functionality.

Developing a Scenario-Based Approach to Portal Design

During our first project phase, we have imagined a number of possible user groups, and we are now looking more closely at which groups, what their needs might be, and what they might like to have appear in our portal. Much of our planning this far has been comparatively abstract, and in looking for models for how we might develop a more detailed inventory, we have studied a short outline by Robert M. Reimann and Elizabeth Bacon, A Scenario-Based Approach to Creating Interaction Frameworks. This will involve more detailed interviews with various participants, the development of their “personas”, and following step 1 in the Reimann/Bacon article, a modeling of their workflow, processes, tasks, objects, etc.

Jesse James Garrett’s “The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams”

To start, our new Portal Working Group is developing an inventory of existing university students services and student groups who might have in interest in appearing in our planned portal. Following Garrett’s model, available here, we are currently developing a content strategy and worrying about content production.