VT.edu Town Hall - July 13

[00:00:12] >> And press. That someone press record so welcome to town hall number two for our V.T. the EDU presentation. I think John and I are concerned about telling a group of people the same thing twice so what I'd like to do is just do a little quick poll and find out how many people came to the first town hall for it it will affect how many slides I can skip and we can make this a more engaging presentation so who came to the first one OK maybe half of this room came to the first one and how about. [00:00:56] Can we how many people are on Zoom we have. Forty six ons in probably hard to do a hand raise ones in. Here's what I'm going to do this will still be fun. People are saying you know I was. The one person. Yeah here's what I'll do we're going to we're going to quickly go through what we covered last time and I'll make it even more interesting John will make it more interesting but we won't hang out as as long on each topic OK so from the top this is this is a big important project for us we are redesigning our university website it's a big complex project in September you would have noticed changes when the brand rollout occurred but those were style changes those were fun changes light color updates a new logo. [00:02:05] This project is about much much more this is about several subjects. And. It's an ongoing project I think that John and I and Melanie and I will probably be focused on this for the rest of our careers at Virginia Tech it's just this you can't design a website and leave it alone you have to consult audiences you have to think about it you have to measure things test things constantly update so what I'm going to do here is go through the entire project why we're doing what we're doing what we're doing how we've made the decisions we've made and I promise I'll get as quickly as I can to the design so that we can get to new stuff sound good and the way we'll do questions John's going to run around and maybe Chris with microphones if you have a question we want to make sure that it goes into a microphone so that the forty six or so people joining us on Zoom can hear it. [00:03:09] All right so here we go why are we doing this well more specifically why are we doing this now. We've got a really great advancement organization that is spreading throughout the university it allows us to work in close coordination with this huge university I mean there are nine colleges welcome School of Medicine. [00:03:34] There's a lot of people here how many students go to school here right thirty thousand it's a very big organisation so we're kind of relying on this advancement organization to try and systematize our approach so now that we've got people in all of these key areas it's just a great opportunity for us to approach our web presence we also have these four kind of big picture business needs that lead us to meeting to improve the Web presence we launched a new brand platform so like I said at the top of this meeting that initial rollout. [00:04:14] You would have seen just a style change was a skin on top of a structure that didn't change we know we're not performing as well as we could in search results and I'm not going to get into the detail of that right now at this meeting but we're looking at new tools. [00:04:31] That have given us greater insight as to just how we're performing against our peers just in general when you look for content that is related to new tech what we're good at we're not performing as well as we could part of this project is to begin fixing that we've said this before but we need to consult and prioritize our audiences V.T. diy you can't speak very well to every audience and so we need to situate what this website is built to do and consider how we can improve it and so that means focus groups that means talking to people it means ongoing usability testing and I'm excited to tell you about a position later on that will help us with that and lastly our site has some fundamental accessibility concerns this is my favorite subject right now to talk about because I think that's the thing we're doing the best at in this whole project so anyone who wants to go into greater detail about accessibility what we're doing well how are getting it right just sign me up for a meeting and I'll bring five or six people and I think it's I think we're getting out ahead of. [00:05:48] Our peers in this area OK So specifically what are we doing we're not changing the Adobe Content Management System same tool same log in if you have a site in A.T.M. Adobe Experience Manager it remains there we are building a new theme to support sites inside of that and we're putting the new in that. [00:06:14] We're also developing a parallel H.T.M.L. team for sites that are not in the C.M.S. and there are reasons that some sites are not in the C.M.S. I'm still coming to understand all of those reasons I think that. Many of them are valid some people have chosen not to be in the C.M.S. because they're not sure what it can do and they maybe don't believe that I can do what they need and I'd be excited to address some of those concerns because I'm I bet we can at that we can do more than some people think. [00:06:47] But it's a it's still I mean we're three years in to having this product and if you have an experienced web team who's building complex web applications that rely on databases somewhere I'm sure that you have reasons to not be in the C.M.S. anyway what we want to do is. [00:07:07] Release this theme and also release an export ID theme that's not dependent on Adobe finally we're cleaning up the information architecture of content at this is really important for the search results problem but I talked about. And it's just important for the end user who's browsing web content and trying to understand what's available. [00:07:37] So how are we doing this there's a that we've been doing lots of meetings really I mean. We've had on campus focus groups many surveys usability testing one. When usability tests that we did on the current year was very illuminating we sat five prospective undergraduate students in front of the website and asked them to find five things how much it costs to go to school here you know how would you go about securing a residence hall room a few key sort of fundamentals in browsing for a university and it was a total disaster and and it was really illuminating and humbling. [00:08:24] So we're trying to learn from those things I think that what's important for us in this project is that we consider our launch the beginning OK so that we can test on an ongoing basis and make sure that that we don't make the same mistakes we have before we've been presenting to all levels of leadership we've spoken to deans and vice presidents all around the university but we've also spoken to big groups. [00:08:53] This is our second town hall at this point we're kind of moving at terminal velocity if that's the right phrase so we can't make wholesale changes to what's happening now or else we won't finish. And we still want to get your feedback. Because this is just how this process is going here's a big group of people that are involved I don't ever want this to seem like John and me are making this website there are a lot of people at the table with us many of you are in the room. [00:09:29] I feel like this project has been an opportunity for me to go around and meet people from all around the university it's been awesome I mean. The fact that it's Friday and it's warm outside and there are this many people in this room is a testament to just how much people are invested in this I just appreciate that. [00:09:51] I'm not going to hang out too long in the slide the point is that we've got outside partners working with us we've worked with some faculty we have amazing collaborators in I.T. assistant technology which might be called something else someone told me It's called accessibility technology that's on right. [00:10:14] And a dedicated steering committee that's made up of members from all around the university so we're getting lots of feedback we're getting lots of. People pushing on where we're going and it's really helped the process along here's our timeline hard to believe it's July but we we've made it through some content strategy we've done a lot of socializing teaming up with colleges and units. [00:10:43] Our web developers are very close to finishing developing the scene I mean where we were hanging out for a long time on some specific subjects because we want to get the accessibility right from the beginning and I have to thank everyone who's helped us along the way Adrian Chandler git Adnan Rob Fentress Rob I don't know if he's on the call but this guy is a scholar of all things web accessibility and he hasn't let us off the hook he's really pushing us to understand it better. [00:11:19] And the result of that is that if you use the theme we build in this content management system you just get all the benefits from all that hard work we spent an hour and a half the other day and then an hour and a half before that six of us on one dropdown menu just banging on it trying to make sure that we've got the markup right that it's intuitive that it's usable and I think those things really matter. [00:11:47] So we're building pages now because it's July and that's where we said we want to be. In August we're going to do Q.A. we're going to roll it out I'll get more details on that later and I think. Given the fact that a lot of you have seen this I'm going to skip through some of the content stuff and get to the design OK so that we can have this be a little bit more of a conversation but in general you should know we would like. [00:12:17] To you to be primarily for inspiring and informing audiences unfamiliar with Virginia Tech and mostly prospective students by the numbers by the impact they are of that audience that has the sort of most importance for this very valuable Web site. We also know that there are a lot of other reasons that people go to BT diy you because you work here because you teach here because you are a business or industry par