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Content Development User experience Website

Ongoing developments

As most of you know, we’re busy pushing on with phase two of the Jisc website redevelopment, which focuses on the R&D section. But while this is taking place, we’re also working hard to keep the shine on the jisc.ac.uk you see now.

Our wishlist

We have a long list of developments for our site. It’s a heady mix of the functionality we didn’t have time to implement for launch, a wishlist of ideas we’ve thought of since, and recommendations made by our users.

I thought it might be nice to highlight some of the more recent changes we’ve rolled out, which you may or may not have spotted.

Wishes granted so far

inform-module2
‘always on’ Inform article titles

It sounds basic, but images on feature boxes are now links. When we launched, you had to click the text in order to move on.

Previously you needed to interact with the Jisc Inform module on the news page in order for the articles to appear. User testing showed these should be always on – and now they are.

One of our favourites is the lovely behind-the-scenes functionality to help searchers. Looking for someone you met at a conference called Bex? Before, unless a nickname like this was included in the page content (which felt rather clumsy) you might have had trouble finding who you were looking for. Now, typing ‘Bex’ in the search should help you find the person you met at that conference. Perfect.

bex-results
Hidden search fields help you to find a friendly face

We’re delighted to have finally cracked the staff directory. Gone is the ambitious ordered-by-firstname technique and in comes a much friendlier A-Z (by surname) bar, on a single page, complete with ‘back to top’ button in case you get lost.

Jisc’s advice is predominantly presented in quick guides, guides and infoKits (detailed guides). We already had the ‘too much info’ boxes on our guides, but now have ‘too little detail’ boxes on our quick guides for when you just can’t get enough of that particular topic.

i-will-be
Meeting people is easy

Jisc folk are a busy lot, so the ability to show where you can meet them on staff profiles and the events listing page is a feature we hope to use more and more.

And that’s just a few…

Your thoughts

What do you think? It may sound cliché, but it’s true: your feedback really is valuable and might lead to some more interesting and helpful developments. Get in touch web@jisc.ac.uk.

By Nathalie Carter

A Bristolian woman of web. Working mostly on keeping our content tip top as well as the smooth day-to-day running of the website.

One reply on “Ongoing developments”

you needed to interact with the Inform module on the news page in order for the articles to appear.

User testing showed these should be always on – and now they are.
Looking for someone you met at a conference called Bex?
Before, unless a nickname like this was included in the page content (which felt rather clumsy) you might have had trouble finding who you were looking for.

Now, typing ‘Bex’ in the search should help you find the person you met at that conference.

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