gabriel mcgovern

Derek Tonn, mapformation, LLC

I skipped this one before, but several people have been raving about it. The session is supposed to go beyond “save for web”.

• Clip art kills! The extra bandwidth wastes electricity for unnecessary graphics.
• 8-bit png is better for logos the gif… It compresses better and smaller. Interesting.

JPG

• remove exif
• remove excess colors
• Apply unique zonal compression!

He also talks about gif and pdf techniques.

Tools

• All the great tools are listed on handouts

For an example, he takes the logo on the HighEdWebDev site from over 100K to under 9K. All without decreasing the quality!

I need to remember to run all of our images through this process.

www.graphicsoptimization.com

Beck Tench, Duke University

OK, I needed to see what beat me for the best of ;)
Actually, I am very happy not to be presenting this morning. Last night was a very late night.

“Really, really dense information and really, really diverse audiences.” She suggest that you can solve that by creating role based navigation, but then it becomes very confining…

What can evolution tell us about user interface? The brain has been developing visual shape thinking for 250 million years. Language communication has only been developing for 35 million years. OK, it’s early - I may have heard the number right, but the idea sticks. She shows some great examples (in all their 8bit glory).

• Concept Map
  • make a list of your domain (nouns)
  • draw lines connecting the terms
  • then add connecting verbs
• Bulls Eye diagram
  • Make a list of tasks user can perform
  • Draw a bullseye with 3 rings
  • Place tasks in rings (post-its work well)
  • Look for natural relationships/structure (what users do before, during, after)
• Navigation Map
  • start at the bottom, pick a landing page (designing on user experience, not taxonomy structure)
  • loosely define the UI for that place
  • go up one level - how did the user get there?
  • Sketch siblings that are connected.
  • step back and look for patterns/relationships
• Work Flow Diagrams
  • write the synopsis sentence
  • define the who/what of each word
  • figure out the milestones (get inside the the users relationship with the process)
  • then think about what the user (alt paths) for users in a hurry.

Now user research:

• Survey/feedback
  • appeal to the users ego
  • make submission painless
  • indicate progress, give visual feedback
  • write unbiased questions
• Card sort
  • Use cards! (better organic understanding)
  • Aim for more then 30, less then 100 cards
  • Allow user to create cards and labels
• Controversial Interview
  • go to interview unprepared (don’t read script)
  • take user off-subject to gain understanding of user (and how they use the internet in general)
  • write a thank you note!
• Ethnography
  • research how thing were done before the online version
  • shadow your target for a day
  • have conversation with relevant non-users
  • write thank you notes

This was a really good session - just a ton of information.

Changing Web 2.0 from Passing fad to Development Methodology
Kyle Bowen, Manager of Information, Purdue University

Looking at buzzwords of yesterday: Webmaster, Information Communication Highway

“The buzzwords of today are the litmus test for tomorrow.” But, are there any lessons that we can learn.

1. Create many small releases: under promise and over deliver.
2. Web applications should be simple: If it requires training, then it is too complicated!
3. Reduce overhead: There are other people who can use a keyboard. (they created a form generator – the user designs and tries, but does not launch)
4. Use interactivity to do work: No need for rich apps when middle-class ones will do. (edit in place, auto complete/suggest, one click adds, modal windows, drag and drop)
5. Video’s compelling: It’s almost like being there.
6. Brand your applications: There are already too many acronyms. (personalizes services)
7. Be a service provider: Purveyors of cool. Make sure you charge everyone! Otherwise they will not respect you.

Who has people at their college that should not be making webpages (secretaries, manages, ect…). For them Purdue has created a “commons area” where they can have a space off of the main site. Best one’s are featured.

This guy is a great presenter. Hilarious, on topic and engaging!

The Oregon judges give him a perfect 10.

Michael Dame from Virginia Tech

It turns out that today is the 6-month anniversary of the tragedy where 32 were lost and dozens of others were injured.

The presentation was one of the most inspiring talks that I have ever been to. Michael is a great speakers and did simply amazing work during the aftermath of the crisis. It would have been worth coming to Rochester, just to hear this.

During the day of the shooting, they had an incredible rise in the amount of traffic due to the media frenzy. Luckily, they had a lightweight version of the homepage ready. Without it, and the help from IT adding extra servers, the entire site would have gone down. By the end of the day they would need 3-servers just to keep the homepage up. By the end of the day, over 430GB of data would be requested (around 15GB is average for the entire site). Would our infrastructure hold?

On top of all this, his team did great work to make sure the information they posted was clear, accurate and compassionate.

• By 2pm the next day they launched a new page that addressed the crisis.
• Multimedia was important for those that could not be there for press events, candlelight vigils and memorials.
• The students and families needs were always put first in all decisions.
• All words were chosen very carefully.

On a completely different note:

Next years conference will be at Missouri State, where Piper, er.. Chad and the rest of his great team work. It will be moved up to October 5th-8th. Hope to see you there.

It showed up before lunch and the front desk at the hotel notified me. I never heard from the airline. Everything is fine, but I have no idea where it has been.

Carmine Granucci, Yale University

Yale purchased their search appliance about 2 years ago. Because of the load (500,000 pages), they decided to go with the appliance vs. the mini.

Price: $20,000 for 1,000,000 pages + extra for 24/7 support.

The administration pages look exactly the same as our google mini box. Collections and front ends look the same. Right now, Yale is using many different front ends. Then he talks a bit about collisions with keywords and synonyms.

One Box: Allows you to insert add-ons with other systems.

• His example is blackboard, which is an interesting idea. Keyword blackboard would bring up specialized content from BB.
• It could also work with the staff directory. If a staff members name is used - the first result could show a row from the staff directory.

Each time you renew the license your get a new box. In other words, you are just buying a new system.

There was some new stuff just released Oct 11:

• Search as you type
• Do it yourself keymatch

Martha Gabriel, University of Brazil

Unfortunately, Martha is currently stuck in Brazil and could be here in person. Fortunately, the staff here was very creative. They networked up an audio connection and she is currently giving her presentation inside of second life.  How appropriate!

For a little while, our avatar (whose point of view is what is being projected onto the screen) starts freaking out a bit, flying around. Soon they get it under control and everything runs smoothly.    

After a basic overview of the second life environ, she starts in to the interesting parts of integrating with education:

• You can buy an island for your institution. Each island has limited land and is tied to a set of “real world” hardware. As land starts to get crowded, prices start to become inflated. Entire island continents currently cost thousands of dollars.
• She her entire university set up in second life.
• Linden dollars is currently $207 to the US dollar. People can make things and then exchange the money for real currency. Many make a real profit this way.
• There is money laundering, just like in a real country.
• I could get linden dollars with US money and then give it to her. She could then exchange it for Brazil currency. This is causing must frustration for many countries. The US is trying to pass a law, making you declare you Linden dollars in your taxes!
• Playboy has its own island…
• Several  University (Princeton, Ohio State, Harvard,…) exist in second life. 

Avatar based systems are not new. However, it is the first to have a complete monetary economy. This, along with the freedom to build your own world/items, makes it very unique and popular.

David Anderson, University of Buffalo

He starts with a little back history and then jumps into showing an example of Webalizer. But his internet connection was not working.

Current the program he uses is Mach 5 FastStats - it took them about 4hours to churn over a year of data. Plus it has some cool extras.

• Hypertext tree view.
  • Cool feature - shows entry and exit points in a visual way.
  • Lets you easily walk down the hierarchy.
• Tracked files.
• Scenario analysis.

Clickheat:

• Open source click tracker.
• Very lightweight.
• Need php5 on server (with GD) - extra JavaScript on pages.
• Output looks very similar to a product we demoed.

Interesting findings:

• People will click on things that are not really links (maybe they should be made in into in links).
• Google analytics is really for commerce. It it useful to others, but sometimes hard to use all the features:
  • Goals can be used to see how people navigate an orientation.
  • Rather then a shopping cart, our goals can be registration or admissions.

Understanding Hydraulics Using Haptics
Michele Adams, Armstrong Atlantic State University

Haptics: Working with the sence of touch.

Haptic devices allow the user to interface with a virtual environments like they were really there. You can feel the virtual items. Devices include pens, gloves, etc…

Applications:

• Medical
  • remote surgery
  • virtual simulation training
  • telemonitoring
• Entertainment
  • online gaming
• Hazardous environments
  • remote vehicles
  • land clearing?
• Academic Research
• Education Potential

HaptEK16 - a series of activities that they developed using stylus feedback devices. The device used is called the Phantom Omni(tm). 6 degrees of freedom. About the size of a sheet of paper. Max force =3.3N.

Software was written in wxPython.

Web 3D Consortium.

“Remember how successful augmenting the audio and visual senses was 50 years ago?”, refering to TV and radio.

Jaclyn Whitehorn and Gina Tinny, The University of Alabama
Actually, only Jaclyn today.

What is it? A JavaScript library. Really good at quickly accessing and modifying any part of your page. Todays buzzword is unobtrusive!

She just threw down the fact that most of those cool Web2.0 effects are not really AJAX. It only becomes the big “A” when your page asynchronously talks to the server. I like her.

jQuery format:
(”Ready” is faster then page.onLoad(). This might solve our page flicker!)

$(document).ready( function() {
// Your code
});

For instance:
Selection: Take 3rd and 4th list item on the page:

$("ul > li").slice(2,4);

She then show some examples working with plug-ins. They are really slick. Would be a perfect addition to our hide/show FAQ. The only problem is that we currently use mootools. The next examples cover adding “.pdf” (which we already do), table striping (which we sometimes do). Very powerful.