Category: User Experience

Information Everywhere

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Service 2.0, User Experience

In the past few weeks I’ve been dabbling (in between my ‘real’ projects of Jerome and Linking You) with the concept of ‘dashboard’ displays and information radiators. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept they are fundamentally a place which presents information in an easy to digest format. Some are pinboards, some are whiteboards, some are clothes lines with bits of paper pegged to them and some are displays or projectors.

What I’ve opted for is the display method, in no small way inspired by the guys at Panic. However, since between ICT we have what is generally referred to as a metric shedload of information that we want to get hold of I decided that instead of crafting a display for each individual group’s specific needs I would instead come up with a sexy looking framework for rapidly building dashboards. These are designed to live on large screens dotted around the office, visible all day to anybody who happens to look at them.

There’s already an example in use at the Service Desk, where a trusty old iMac is proudly displaying various stats from Zendesk (our ticket manager) to the support team. Initial feedback is that people really like being able to get an overview of what’s going on in one place, as well as any urgent jobs and their feedback averages.

Down in the depths of OST, on the other hand, we’re not massively bothered about our ticket stats in such an immediate manner. Instead we’re far more interested in things like our server availability, response time and load. This means that the modules on our dashboard currently pull data from our Nagios monitoring tool, informing us with the red alert klaxon from Star Trek if things go horribly wrong (causing much turning of heads towards the board to see what’s happened, and everyone else in ICT looking at us in confusion).

Hopefully as time goes on more people will find data which can be represented using these boards, meaning that they will start popping up in more places and exposing data which lets us make faster, smarter decisions about what we’re doing. I’ve already started working on a dashboard for getting the data from the agile development tracker that Alex and I use into a really easily digested format, and I’ll be talking to the Projects team to find out exactly what they want to see with regards to more overarching project management.

Easier? I think so.

It’s Time for Support Zen

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

It is with great and unreserved pleasure that I announce the grand opening of one of ICT’s latest projects, which has been occupying a surprisingly large amount of my time over the last two months and which has led to me wrapping my head around some quite interesting bits of JavaScript.

Zendesk is here. Or, as we prefer to call it, the Support Desk. It’s a one-stop shop for all your ICT and Estates queries and requests, managed by our crack group of support agents and backed by the combined centuries of knowledge and experience offered by the ICT and Estates teams.

It’s been an interesting journey thought the backwaters of the University’s policies and processes, a less than enjoyable romp through bits of law which I didn’t even know existed, and an exhilarating codathon whilst I wrapped my head around slinging JSON across the ether and inserting it into some HTML elements which don’t exist on a page I don’t control using nothing more than a well-crafted bit of JavaScript and a paperclip. All that is behind us now, so it’s time to tell you what’s new and awesome in the world of getting ICT and Estates support at Lincoln.

First of all, we’ve taken the best bits from both, ditched the worst bits and then streamlined the whole process. From the moment you call or email your request it’s placed directly into Zendesk from where we can monitor how it’s doing. Even better, why not submit your query online using our new request form, now with even fewer annoying questions which you don’t know the answer to than before. It’s a simple matter to sign in using your normal University details and skip the whole process of telling us your name, email address, room code, phone number, line manager, inside leg measurement and what you had for lunch yesterday.

As soon as your request is logged you’ll get a request tracking number within seconds, followed up by emails every time we update your request with something you need to know. You’ll never be out of the loop again, and you can even go online and check all your requests to see how we’re getting on. Leave comments, upload files, tell us that it’s solved and more all from right within your browser.

We could have left it there, but we weren’t done. It only took a few minutes of looking to realise that our how-to guides, instruction manuals, FAQs and more were scattered hopelessly around the Portal, Blackboard, paper help sheets, PDF files, student guides, posters and more. This wasn’t good enough, so we decided to bring them all together into Quick Answers. It’s the place to find solutions to your problems both common and esoteric, guides to walk you through getting things done, information on what’s going on and all kinds of other things. Just type your question or a few key words into the search box and see what we can tell you. Think something’s missing? Just drop me an email and we’ll get it added.

At the end of Phase 1 we’re really excited about the changes and we hope that they make everyones lives a lot easier, as well as helping you to get your problems solved faster than before. Support Desk: now open.

Induction With Added Awesome

Nick Jackson / / My Lincoln, User Experience

The University of Lincoln is currently doing really well in terms of improving its standing in the NSS, which measures student satisfaction. It’s doing this by focussing a fair bit (although not as much as I’d like) of its energies on the student experience.

At the beginning of this year I spent induction week mostly watching what was going on, how students behaved, and what went wrong. I came up with a report on induction problems which spanned 4 sides of A4, detailing everything from confusion over what a student’s email address was through to the fact that people were told to fully update their laptop before they came to university by a flyer on their bed when they arrived (oops). However, this blog post isn’t about trying to fix those problems or assign blame to any one group (if that’s even possible). Instead it’s about trying to change how we handle bits of induction so that those problems simply don’t exist. Let’s get going.

Make Awesome Induction Material

Ring binders are long-lasting, compact and awesome.

One cause of a lot of problems was the sheer volume and variety of printed material that students were given in their induction manual, nicely wrapped up in a folder which had “This folder is full of important information. Don’t say we didn’t tell you!” printed on a bit of paper visible through the side. Quite apart from being condescending to the new students (I overheard more than one student commenting on “being treated like children”) the effect was akin to picking up a Sunday newspaper and watching 14 different supplements fall out. Students were given a University handbook, a copy of the University regulations, an SU handbook, the IT Handy Guide, a bit about the Library, a bit of paper telling them where to find their induction timetable, a schedule of SU events, a map of the campus, and probably a free pen as well. All useful, but ultimately disorganised and hard to find what you’re looking for.

Here’s what I propose. Every student should be given an A5 polypropylene ring binder printed with the University logo. The contents of this folder would be much the same as the current induction material, just collated, formatted, edited, typeset and properly published and printed on reasonable weight paper by a central body. This does have the slightly unwanted side effect of imposing a deadline by which to get induction material produced, but it’s necessary if the University wants to provide a solid experience. This material is neatly split into sections using properly printed tabs (also on polypropylene for added toughness, and because it will look great) so that a student can find what they’re looking for easily. This is where it gets awesome.

Ring binders can have extra information added to them very easily. This means that each student’s folder can have a section titled ‘My Course’, which will have material directly relevant to them such as induction timetables! Similarly we can add material to deal with ‘exception’ students such as mature or international, and – the pièce de résistance – a personalised page with their ID number, email address, name and contact details of their subject librarian and course co-ordinator and so on. Signing in is easier, getting in touch with course specific support is easier. Everyone wins, except for the people who expected to be able to add their material to the enrolment pack the weekend before students arrived.

Continue reading “Induction With Added Awesome”

Build a Better Bookmark

Nick Jackson / / User Experience

Here’s a really quick one.

Now we’ve got awesome self service machines in the Library which can print decent receipts, why not rearrange receipts to be a bit more useful? Presenting Receipt v2, which doubles as an awesome bookmark (if you just take out one book… not quite figured out two or more), shows you the due date at the top (so it’s sticking out) and includes a QR code for quickly grabbing more details or renewing.

This is standard 80mm receipt paper (although it would easily move to 70mm if that’s what the machines use) and QR codes are easily readable by all modern mobiles at that kind of scale. Should probably include a web link as well using the magic of Linking You.

The Dashboards Are Coming!

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Service 2.0, User Experience

Hot on the heels of my ability to extract key information from Zendesk, I’m pleased to announce that we now have two new bits of data available for people to digest. The first one is a set of numbers from our current service desk software, which will (hopefully) be appearing in the ICT service desk sometime in the next week whilst we try hammer through some old tickets.

The next, more usefully for everyone on the academic side, is a summary display of PC availability in the GCW. There’s a bit of worry that the numbers may not be 100% accurate, but we’ve got a hardware audit planned so hopefully by the 24/5 opening these stats will be shockingly accurate, and possibly arranged into zones so you can find a free seat even easier.

Enjoy!

A Dashboard of Joy

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

As you will know if you’ve been kicking aroud ICT for any length of time we’re moving to a brand new helpdesk software provider, the delightful people at Zendesk. Aside from the massive list of benefits we get from this (you’ll see loads about it when we launch at Christmas) we can also now tap directly into our helpdesk’s statistics to generate useful information in real-time. Going one better than this, we (finally) have the ability to put useful information on a giant display in the helpdesk, letting them know a few useful numbers and pretty graphs.

This is using a combination of live queue data from the Zendesk API, and graphs generated daily from the nice people at GoodData. Obviously as we get a better grip on what people want to know we can mix and match even more, graphing things like trends and response rates down to the minute.

Even better, this same framework can be used for other key information throughout ICT. I’ll be updating it to a more modular system capable of supporting things like server response data and network status graphs, paving the way for even more big screens of knowledge to give a bird’s-eye view over all our systems at once.

“But it’s not our fault…”

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

There’s been an article recently on Bullet Online about the new self service machines in the library, and how some students find them difficult to use. This, I feel, is a fair point given that it took me a couple of minutes to get to grips with them and I’m pretty darn technology savvy.

What annoys me however is not that the Library didn’t make fixing the problem its number 1 priority (which it should – the system should have been overhauled for usability within days, not 2 months later and nothing done), but what one of the comments on the blog says. I’m not even annoyed at the contents of the comment, but what a subject librarian said when a student rep brought up the issue in a subject committee:

The subject librarin told us that the machines are state of the art and that the library has recived national regonision for this.

How to issue books using the self service machines.

Step back, and think about that. “It’s not a problem, these machines are state of the art”. So was the baggage handling system at Heathrow Terminal 5, and look what happened there. “It’s not our fault that your bags are lost somewhere because we didn’t test and train properly, the machine is state of the art”. That subject librarian should be hauled over the coals. It’s a problem because the student rep has told you it is, so what you need to do is acknowledge it and say what you’re going to do to fix it.

It has taken me a few minutes to put together this poster which explains (very clearly) how to take books out in 8 steps, and what to do if things go wrong. In my personal opinion this is about three steps too long, but these things can be improved on later. It is something like this which the Library should have done as soon as they realised there was a usability issue, not form a subcommittee (yes, there really is one) to discuss how they can improve usability and consider writing some help documentation.

Just Blog

Nick Jackson / / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else, User Experience

Today in the daily staff alerts I spotted an update about the new Engineering Hub. This is the University’s newest new building (the newest building is the refurbed Business and Law building in the old Echo offices), and will be the only new engineering school in the country for many years. However, this blog post isn’t about that.

Instead I’m wondering why news about this building (and indeed any building project) is limited to very infrequent updates on the staff mailing list (but not students, I checked). Students and staff alike are interested in what’s going on; they want to know about how new buildings are coming on, what kinds of work are being done, and why that door at the west end of the MAB is never working properly. University building projects already have a blog, last updated well over a year ago. It takes all of 5 minutes to throw together an update, or perhaps 15 minutes to do a roll-up (with photos) of what’s been happening over the last week.

Anyway, for those who are interested the building is on schedule, with piled foundations, ground beams and some ground floor slabs done. The steel frame of the building is starting to go up next week. Oh, and you’ll be pleased to hear that “method statements for the safe steel erection have been developed in conjunction with the contractor, Estates Infrastructure team and the university’s own construction health and safety team”.

This isn’t your grandparents’ support desk

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

Recently, in amongst the myriad of Jerome and Total ReCal (not to mention G2, the CWD revamps, fixing LUNA bugs, Dashboard, Nucleus, Linking You, Get Satisfaction, colour remote printing and a swathe of other Labs projects) I’ve been taking a serious look at Zendesk as a replacement for our current service desk ticketing system. In short I’m sold, and I’m pretty sure that a few other people are as well. After looking at a few other SaaS ((Software as a Service)) helpdesk providers Zendesk wins out for me on a number of features, but first and foremost on its simplicity and flexibility. Let me elaborate.

Yesterday we switched on a sandbox for us to play around in and use for testing. It’s already visually customised, using our SSO ((Single Sign-On)) solution, using a custom domain, running with an SSL certificate, has custom fields in the ticket view, implements some of our business logic in triggers and automations, has our SLAs built in and flags trouble tickets, integrates with our Twitter account and Get Satisfaction support portal, has a variety of custom reports ready to go and has a small set of knowledge base articles available. Not bad for a few hours work.

We also gain the inherent benefits of SaaS, meaning that we no longer have servers or infrastructure for our support desk solution to worry about, and we gain new features the moment that they’re available without needing to sign up to another n-year contract. Licensing fees are on a per-agent basis so we’re not spending any more than we have to. We can access it on and off campus (something we can’t do at the moment without resorting to VPN. There’s even a mobile application so our roving support technicians can update tickets as soon as they need updating.

Alongside this there are a few other side effects. Our knowledge base can finally be extracted from the inner depths of Portal (where it resides in a set of PDF files and Word documents) and updated so that it’s finally up to date. We can have more agents, so that finally issues can be assigned to the right people. We can email everybody when things happen to tickets so they don’t languish at the bottom of the queue forever. There’s a nice web interface for everybody, so both agents and users alike can look through their own ticket history.

My target is to have us using it in two weeks. Wish me luck.

Make It Look Good

Nick Jackson / / User Experience

Take a look at this website.

This is our current staff directory search. It’s very simple, does more or less what it says on the tin, and looks like it’s been thrown together in Front Page in about a minute. Whilst normally I’m not a massive fan of websites which are chock full of unnecessary imagery, there are some situations where you just have to go “you know what, why can’t we make this look good and be functional at the same time?” So I duly busted out my CSS-fu and had a go.

It loads just as quickly, it does exactly the same thing, but it looks so much nicer. It also avoids words like “criteria”, which sound a bit over the top for native English speakers and just confuse the hell out of those who have it as a second language. Behind the scenes it also avoids a load of the crap which Microsoft decides is necessary to build a web page (apparently JavaScript is a necessity to submit a POST form), and since it uses the CWD it is mobile ready without any extra effort.

You may never see the result of this quick hack I did today, but I really hope you do.