PSU Portfolio


Introduction

The Portfolio project was part of a national initiative involving six universities to take a look at placing a university’s portfolio online. One of the desired outcomes of the project was to make headway into designing a portfolio which could be accepted (in the future) by accreditor boards as a replacement for the cumbersome, paper-based reports that universities currently produce. An obvious benefit being that these reports could gain a richness impossible with traditional methods by incorporating supporting content such as multimedia ( eg. music, movies, etc ) and links to other intra-campus websites.

Portland State University also intended to use the website as a planning tool to help shape and map the University’s direction for improving education.

I was brought on the project midstream to help them with their site design and structure. They felt that their current website and the direction it was taking wasn’t going to meet their needs. In the end I had created 5 websites for different aspects of the project.

Consulting responsibilties

Brainstorming and project goals
During the initial phase of the project, I worked with the departmental staff from Portland State to talk about their needs for the project. We held several brainstorming sessions to discuss what the project was about, their initial visions, where they were and what the project could become. Some of my recommendations included elements of graphic design, web site usability/accessibility, and publishing the software under an open source model.

Project management

  • Conduct meetings, track tasks and take notesI kept track of meeting topics and notes and tasks each one of us had. These notes formed our meeting agendas for each project meeting.I used a Zope Wiki to store and organize this type of information.
  • Work with the PSU technical department for the project’s needsI served as an intermediary between the two departments to fulfill the project requirements – installing new software, establishing domain names, and also working through technical issues related to their Zope install and user management.
  • Work with graphic designerI worked closely with the graphic designer to offer suggestions and make sure that the graphics followed the various goals established for the project – enhancing the look and feel of the web site and increasing usability and navigation.
Web site development and training

  • Development and project tasksI designed the web site taking into account all of the goals, features and issues which were discussed during the brainstorming. Some major issues to be addressed were navigation and usability, difficulties with large-site maintanence, and security.During the project I also kept track of the project status and remaining tasks.
  • Training and documentationI frequently held informal training sessions with the university staff to instruct them on the use of the site, to go over the documentation, and get feedback on documentation content.
  • Created four meta-data sitesI created four Wikis to hold information about the web site. Two of them to hold documentation – one for the user guide and one for the technical guide. Together they hold over 210 web pages of documentation! ( This is equivalent to many more printed pages! )

Project Goals and Features

Below are five areas, or goals, which roughly encompass the different features that I recommended be incorporated into the project. Each goal is followed by a short description and a link to more specific details about that goal’s features – features which make this project cool and unique.

Read on to find out why The Portfolio is a killer web site!

The Five Project Goals
  1. Enhance Visual AppealCreate a web site which is able to draw in people – to make them want to read and interact with the site. Create a web site with a clean, simple graphic design combined with “fun” graphical elements to make an attractive web site people will enjoy visiting.( read about the specific features which enhanced the visual appeal )
  2. Streamline UsabilityCreate a web site which is easy to navigate and conforms to current usability research. Add additional accessibility features for those with special usability needs.( read about the specific features which improved the site usability )
  3. Simplify ContributionCreate a web site which is easy to contribute to and flexible in its layout allowing the information to be linked together in different ways. Enable the web site to help keep track of information and notify contributors about problems with content integrity.( read about the specific features which simplify contribution )
  4. Simplify MaintenanceCreate a web site which is simple to administrate. Enable the web site work smarter and notify administrators about problems.( read about the specific features which simplify site administration )
  5. Share It (Open Source)Make the code available for those who wish to learn from our experiences.( read about the specific features which enable knowledge sharing )