Sadly, years later, that debate continues to bubble on <uwebd/>, as if nothing had changed … as if, for instance, the rigid but predictable interface of Facebook had not prevailed over the chaos of MySpace.

The institutional website has never before been more important to the success of the academic enterprise. Indeed, the website is now considered by many to be analogous, if not equal, to the bricks and mortar of the college campus itself, so much so that the U.S. Department of Justice is proposing new rules that will put the websites of colleges and universities on equal legal standing (and risk) with their buildings, as public accommodations subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The legal risk management issues inherent in developing higher education websites have never been more acute. And even outside of those legal risks lie the simple risks of embarrassment; academic institutions are on notice now as never before; we’ve simply got to strive to make our sites better, each day, for all users. Dylan Wilbanks, recently of the University of Washington, experienced a little bottom-of-the-box archaeology on his way out the higher-ed door, which he recounted in a post, “Why universities have websites.” Yup.

So, to governance. Admittedly, the word might strike many, even most, as unpleasant. It goes to the very heart of the academic enterprise: freedom. The question becomes one of balance: how do we offer consistent and easy access to content and at the same time avoid interfering in the speech or ideas that the content describes?

First, to provide an infrastructure that optimizes access to content, more is required, WAY more, than look and feel. Owing to past insightful campus leadership on the subject of web governance, we’ve long since moved beyond templates, taking our first steps into the world of a “platform;” a foundation for web computing.

At UNL, our code, which includes the look and feel of the website as well as many underlying functions, is distributed more widely and deeply than at almost any other academic institution of similar size. The code supports a significant and growing core of functions that goes well beyond the simple construction of HTML web pages that many are familiar with, and perhaps reminded of, when the word “template” is used. There are now many of these functions that are part of each UNL.edu page; I’ll take you on a quick tour through four that I consider most important.

Mobile access to UNL.edu web content is no longer a nice-to-have option. Indeed, it was just announced by the research firm International Data Corporation that smartphones outsold PCs for the first time ever in the final quarter of 2010. Development continues on this capability, but University Communications has implemented a mobile server (m.unl.edu) that repackages UNL.edu content for display on mobile devices, providing that content is served from UNL’s main web host and it’s published ‘according to Hoyle’ in the UNL.edu codebase.

Accessibility of all UNL web pages can’t be guaranteed, as any code placed within the provided page ‘frame’ must be made accessible, but it’s important to note that UNL site code distributed by the Web Developer Network conforms to the success criteria of the coming ADA standards; indeed the UNL.edu homepage conforms to machine-testable standards for web accessibility at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level AA – a mouthful that will form the “success criteria” to be mandated under the law as part of ADA in the coming few years (back to the Department of Justice reference in the second paragraph for more information).

And then there’s Single Sign-on. Once you’ve authenticated to one service through Login.unl.edu, each UNL.edu page that you traverse throughout that web session is ‘aware’ of your login status. This allows you to maintain your UNL security level throughout the browser session, and enter multiple authenticated web services on the site without the hassle of repetitive logins or a plethora of username/password combinations. It’s at once more secure, and much, much easier. And a common authentication service leads to some very interesting possibilities, as it will eventually become possible to ‘mash up’ data from several web services into single interfaces that bring all data elements of any process together: Click, click, done.

Finally, I’ll mention emergency alerting, not because it’s central on a day-to-day basis to accessing content that’s important to the academic enterprise, but because on the very rare occasion that it is central, it may be the only thing that matters. Today, every UNL.edu page stays in constant contact with UNL emergency-alert servers maintained by Information Services and UNL Police. The pages, like a child in the backseat asking “are we there yet?” constantly (every 30 seconds) ‘pings’ the server. Any emergency alerts issued by UNL Police are displayed on any open UNL.edu web page within an average of 45 seconds after they’re issued (from end to end, this is one of the fastest-available channels for distribution of alert messages).

Without a history of web governance at UNL, we would have none of the above. And we would have none of the important and substantial contributions that have come into the UNL.edu codebase over the years from Web Developer Network members in the Department of Mathematics, the College of Business Administration, University Housing, Business and Finance, IANR and many others, too numerous to mention.

Governance isn’t sexy. But think about it: governance is in many ways what makes us free. Without it, our nation couldn’t have gone to the moon or built the Interstate highway system, which gave us new science and engineering and the freedom to move about with unprecedented ease. It gave us the Internet, which has allowed anyone to publish for a worldwide audience. Without governance, this university couldn’t have built the buildings in which all of the amazing and enriching activity of the academic enterprise occurs, or hired the talented professors that lead it.

Governance is the management of things that are important enough to be governed. As the expectations of our students and other site users continue to advance, the demands on our website(s) will continue to grow. We’re going to need more governance, not less. Better governance, rather than none.

Spring is almost here. So let a thousand flowers bloom. But let them be flowers.

A year or so later, Microsoft Windows got similar technology; so similar, in fact, that it turned out that a lot of it was cut-and-pasted QuickTime code. The resulting litigation was not settled until 1997, when Bill Gates famously appeared above a beleaguered Apple conference, as Orwellian in appearance as the screen-bound antagonist from the ’1984′ ad, and announced MS’s continuing commitment to producing the Mac version of MS Office, as well as a $150M investment in Apple, overshadowing as symbol (a public vote of confidence in the company) the substance in the settlement of the first major skirmish on digital video patents.

What isn’t well-known to this day is that hidden at the center of the public rapprochement between Apple and Microsoft was a thorny issue that persists: who will control the digital formats on which video content is delivered? Who owns the video format?

There have been many skirmishes in the online-video format wars: the Rise and Fall of Real, the brief reign of The Three Formats (you had to encode Real, QuickTime and Windows to make sure all of your bases were covered), followed by the Five Years of FLV. Proprietary formats were battling it out, corporations chasing the dream of ultimately becoming the toll-taker for all digital video. And while every other media type (images, audio, etc.) settled on a set of standards, video did not, and the web suffered. Finally, Adobe’s widespread Flash plug-in gained the ability to play back h.264 video. And web developers in droves began encoding and delivering their content through that format. Of particular relevance to universities, the inclusion of h.264 support in Flash meant that the very same video file that was being played online in a web page could be uploaded to iTunes U.

Things seemed settled. So, naturally, it’s time for a flashback.

In the late nineties, the Motion Picture Experts Group, the part of the International Standards Organization that ratifies transport and encoding formats so that software developers, producers and hardware manufacturers can build markets around those standards (think CDs and DVDs for starters) … that group, MPEG, wanted to develop a new, better standard for digital audio and video. It would be called MPEG-4. So the Motion Picture Experts Group asked for submissions of then-current container architectures (container architectures differ from codecs; container architectures typically support many codecs) to be evaluated as candidates for the new standard. The short of it is that Apple’s QuickTime format became the MPEG-4 container format.

The seed of a new, global standard for online video was forming. It would be ratified by the same organization that brought us MP3 audio and the MPEG-2 video format that is the basis for the video content on every DVD in existence. To say that the MPEG standards had credibility is to vastly understate the case. The MPEG standards were digital media; they formed the basis of several multi-billion-dollar industries.

MPEG-4 would be aimed squarely at solving the problem of proprietary video and audio standards online. But it wasn’t until the high-quality video codec variously called h.264, MPEG-4 Part 10, or the Advanced Video Codec (AVC) was introduced as a component within the MPEG-4 container that things got really interesting. It was a great codec, better than anything else. Good enough that it gained a significant following as the standard to beat, solidifying itself as the de facto data standard for video on Blu-Ray, satellite and cable. But all of those formats are products. They generate income for the hardware manufacturers, the cable and satellite companies, and the developers of production suites. There’s money being made, and none of those companies think twice about paying for using the MPEG patents.

A patent pool was formed, now 27 members strong. Apple is there, of course, as is Microsoft. Sony, Sharp, Dolby Labs and every other consumer electronics company you can think of. And one of our higher-ed cousins, Columbia U. Each of those entities developed part or parts, plural, of the h.264 standard. And each of them has employees who expect to be provided food, clothing and shelter. They expect to be paid for their ideas, ideas that are expressed in the code that forms the h.264 codec.

But the online world was, and is, different. Much of the video being distributed online is being produced and distributed by nonprofits, or by individuals just for the fun of it. Paying MPEG-LA, the company taking payment for the patent pools for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, for encoding in their format, while realizing no income for the video being delivered, Just Wasn’t Gonna Work.

Once again, there would be conflict. Free software and open standards had been gaining steam, beginning in the late nineties. A committed and zealously-held point of view proclaimed the argument that ideas should be free, content should be free, or at least content creators should be able to choose to make their content free, and that encapsulating that content inside a patent-encumbered format ultimately represented a compromise on that ideal. So a lot of ultimately pointless work was done to try to make the ancient underpinnings of On2 Technologies’ abandoned VP3 video format competitive, released in its second incarnation as the free-and-open Ogg Theora codec.

Meanwhile, Adobe added h.264 support to Flash, and Apple put out a phone that played video, but only h.264 video. On that phone on the day of its announcement was a YouTube app that played h.264 video, which sounded a bit odd at the time since YouTube video was all encoded in On2 Technologies’ VP6 delivered within a Flash container (FLV). But, on cue, at the iPhone unveiling a YouTube representative made the announcement that h.264 would become the base format for video on the YouTube, and that they’d begun converting their library to the new format. It was a big deal for creating a unified video standard; a very big deal.

On the opposing ‘open video’ front, despite high-profile support from Wikipedia, the Theora codec in all likelihood died this spring when Google bought, then later open-sourced, On2 Technologies’ VP8 (five better than VP3!) codec, renaming it WebM. For a while, it looked like WebM might upset what had been a solidifying ecosystem of support for h.264 video online. WebM appeared to be high-quality, a true competitor to h.264. Many would say it was a dead-even wash in quality, giving WebM the advantage in that it was, and was to remain, free and open.

But wait a minute, people cried. Even though the web development community generally likes and trusts Google, the same couldn’t necessarily be said about On2 Technologies. Some experts even went so far as to dig into the source code in VP8/WebM. Source code generally is the level where patents are examined, and enforced, in software. Remember that settlement between Microsoft and Apple regarding code that was copied from QuickTime and ended up in VIdeo for Windows? History, as they say, tends to repeat itself. The bugaboo for free formats that solve very complex problems is submarine patents; the only way to make absolutely sure that developers don’t copy code from somewhere else is to send them to live on a sister planet, light years away, while they code. And that, even if Ridley Scott’s directing it, is a current impossibility.

As it turns out, the developer of the free x264 h.264 encoder (if I’m losing you now, keep going … you’ve got too much time invested to stop now), Jason Garret-Glaser, went looking. And what he found was a veritable minefield of potential submarine patent claims in VP8/WebM. “With regard to patents, VP8 copies too much from H.264 for comfort, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. This doesn’t mean that it’s sure to be covered by patents, but until Google can give us evidence as to why it isn’t, I would be cautious.” That’s the way he put it. The way I’d put it is “Here, There be Dragons.”

Yesterday, MPEG-LA, the organization that administers the MPEG-4 patent pool, announced that h.264, AVC, Part 10, whatever you want to call it, would be permanently royalty-free online as long as the video is free to end users. In other words, if you encode your video in h.264 and put it on the Internet to be enjoyed by others, and you don’t charge those viewers to view your content, neither will the patent-holders of h.264 charge you for using their patents. And those patents are known, legally-vetted, and in contrast to WebM, much closer to being a sure thing. Granted, h.264 isn’t ‘free,’ as in ‘freedom’ in the sense that technogurus like Richard Stallman espouse.

But it’s free as in money, forever, and that’ll be good enough for most.

So for now, as I write this, it has the beguiling, slightly ponderous title ‘On Design,’ as if it’s going to reveal to you some big truths about design. If you were misled by the title, this is where I tell you to hit the ‘Back’ button; you simply must learn to use your time more wisely.

As a formula, “Design by Committee” is thought by most designers to be the one true path to blandness, lifelessness in design. And most of them have a lot of personal experience to back it up.

The UNL.edu site is itself a product of committee, though we try to make that a good thing. It’s an accumulation of best ideas from the members of the UNL Web Developer Network, dragged through a sometimes-merciless process that chips away at egos as much as it does at designs. At times, the steering wheel is grabbed a little more sharply than at other times by University Communications, but at all times we (UComm Internet and Interactive Media and the UNL Web Developer Network) try to be focused on evaluating and implementing the best solutions to problems no matter where they come from.

So before recording here the flurry of notices lately on the 2009 design of the UNL site, I need to nod to past history; the 2006 version of the UNL templates was developed under the design leadership of Aaron Grauer (then of University Housing, now of Firespring); that template was featured in the eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design, published in spring 2009, a few months before the 2009 version of the site was launched. It was a strong foundation to build from.

“Usable,” in most cases involving university websites, means that the site would be usable if only there were any consistency on the site. At UNL, we have the rare privilege of developing and evolving a higher ed site that is consistent in its major interface elements from stem to stern, mostly because our campus leadership believes that the site represents a singular entity, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, rather than a loose collection of boutiques. Even if a user doesn’t like what we do, they can be assured at least that once they learn how to use the interface we present here, they won’t have to learn a new mode of use or navigation at every turn on the site.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln was slotted in at No. 2 on a list of the top 11 best-designed university websites from The Bivings Report. The Bivings Report is a publication of the Bivings Group, a Washington, D.C.-based Internet communications company that lists Sony, Toyota, Peace Corps, HP, Humana, and Pickens Plan among its clients. Their commentary includes: “This is the most ‘Web 2.0′ looking of the sites, which isn’t a bad thing given the level of execution.” Hrm.

As I write this, a colleague tells me that one of our favorite publications, Smashing Magazine, has published an article this morning that places UNL.edu within a ‘Showcase of Academic and Higher Education Websites.’ “A simple color scheme and clean, grid-based layout give the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s website a polished and sophisticated look,” they say.

The UNL website also ranked in the top one percent of university websites globally (77th out of 8000 analyzed) in a recent ‘webometrics’ ranking of world universities by the Cybermetrics Lab of Spain’s National Research Council, that country’s largest public research body. That project measures open access to scholarly information, and so is at least as much a measure of the egalitarian leanings of this university as it is the access to that information provided by our website’s template.

And though ‘Noteworthy’ doesn’t sound like much, it’s actually one of the things that means the most to us in UComm and UNL WDN, because it isn’t given from a single point of view but from a cumulative opinion-gathering process involving the higher ed web development community. Only 24 sites per year from hundreds (thousands?) submitted are highlighted as ‘Noteworthy’ by eduStyle, the homepage for higher ed web design. UNL.edu was selected as a Noteworthy site for October of 2009, the second time it had been so honored (the first in 2006).

Thanks, kudos and hosannas to all who have participated in the UNL Web Developer Network over the years, those who have worked on the site coding and/or design itself, and those who continue to push the site forward. Thanks, even (especially), to those who don’t like something about the site, as long as you tell us about it so we can continue to improve.

As a follow-up to the January WDN meeting, where I first presented this, I have put together a video outlining how to get the data from Google Analytics:

Expect more Google Analytics updates in the coming months!

College Navigation January 2010

In the Background

In between attending this year’s High Ed Web conference (Mark Greenfield’s ‘The Kids are Alright’ session and a subsequent UNL-Greenfield conversation on the airport shuttle created a particular itch in my brain), picking up a new copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto at Mark’s urging (the 10th Anniversary Edition has been rewritten and recalibrated), and conducting last night’s focus group (along with Seth Meranda and Meg Lauerman), I am more convinced than ever that we are out of step with the students we are here to serve.

Institutions Care About Different Things Than Users Do.

Where does the institution perceive value in an online environment? For too long, the institutional point of view has trumped the user perspective when considering the overall perceived value of the software platforms that make a university go. “This is where the data goes” is more important, seemingly, than “this is how the user experiences her interaction with the data.” For many of the academic enterprise’s administrative systems, the systems that manage financials, student information, hiring, etc., it doesn’t matter so much. Because many of those systems’ users are employees. While substandard UIs might affect their productivity and job satisfaction, and may cost the university in terms of lost efficiency, employees are more likely to value their paycheck over the annoyances of bad interface and experience.

Broadly, those experiences with substandard interfaces result in employees who, in the end, don’t expect much from user experience. That would be sad enough in itself, but for its unintended consequence: decisionmaking bodies composed of people with low expectations for user experience tend to breed more systems with bad, even user-hostile, user experience. Restated, substantially all of the people in decisionmaking positions regarding computer systems in the university are employees who are used to wrestling with the often-byzantine user experiences of our enterprise apps. Is it a stretch to suppose that all of the figurative toe-stubbing endured dealing with those systems over the years has left most of the decision-makers a bit exhausted, perhaps jaded where online user experience is concerned?

Students expect more and they expect better. And it’s not because they’re cranky.

Our university’s fundamental mission of education involves engagement with a user population that is dramatically different where their user experience expectations are concerned. They have very high expectations, and they are not casual about them. What is expected is expected, and if it is not there, that unfulfilled expectation turns to disappointment.

Consider that incoming students in the fall of 2009 were already born when the web was invented. Their favorite games as children were likely played on computers, through engrossing and fanciful user experiences that rewarded exploration. Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was spreading around the net before they reached kindergarten. The ‘net is not a second language to them. To them, the Internet is and has always been. They have used computers, have communicated and interacted through computers, all of their lives.

The powerful upshot of all of this is that not only do they respond to what’s presented in a focus group, they know what’s possible (or, at least, what should be possible). They instinctively ‘get’ that data can come from multiple sources and be presented in a single optimized interface. Every day, they see it happen across their data landscape, with YouTube videos showing up in Facebook, mashups between Flickr and Google Maps, and on and on. And not only do they know what’s possible, they know what they want, and they recognize the sometimes huge gaps between what they want and know is possible and what they have. It’s the “can’t have it” gap.

In last night’s focus group session, students described the schizophrenic process required each semester to simply continue their enrollment at the university. One described the three windows that he, every enrollment period, painstakingly arranged on his computer screen. On the left, a display of his degree audit report. At center, the PDF of the undergraduate bulletin. On the right, the Schedule of Classes. Copying and pasting data between all three, preparing a list of call numbers to be entered into the enrollment system at the designated hour of 8 a.m. It was no surprise when the entire group responded to the question “should we integrate all of this?” with a resounding “yes!”

Every focus group yields good intel; you invariably leave smarter than you arrived. But last night’s was remarkable for its yield of Things We Hadn’t Thought of Yet. One student spoke up and asked if he could have a weekly calendar displayed, blocking out the various course times as they selected them in the Schedule of Classes. An honors student wanted the system to know, by user authentication, that she was an honors student, and to highlight Honors sections. All wanted ACE (Achievement-Centered Education) data to be pulled in and displayed alongside the course descriptions. Students want that data integrated, presented friction-free in one interface. They expect us to bring it to the surface. They don’t care that it comes from seven or eight different databases likely run by the same number of university departments. They don’t care about that at all.

For now we’ll deliver all that is within our control to deliver for Undergraduate Bulletin 1.0. There is a gap between that first generation of the Undergrad Bulletin online, to launch in late spring 2010, and the second version that would integrate data into an optimized user experience. It’s the difference between what we envision and where our systems are now, what departments “own” the relevant data and  who they trust to display it.

The “can’t have it gap” is a vulnerability. Because while it persists, there are others that are delivering. How much quality user experience affects recruitment and retention is anyone’s guess. But until we meet students’ expectations across a whole range of user experience of which the enrollment process is but a small part, we are vulnerable by comparison to competitive institutions and enterprises that have a comprehensive strategy to optimize their online student experience.

A friend of Doc Searls’ gave The Cluetrain Manifesto its title with this quote, about a Silicon Valley tech company that had fallen on hard times: “The clue train stopped there four times a day, and they never took delivery.”

The University of Phoenix now has 420,000 students, up 22 percent over last year.

The report, to those involved in the day-to-day work of creating and publishing content on a university website, is probably not all that surprising. But there’s a big difference between opinion and facts in our discussions with those who control budgets and therefore the mix of media carrying our messages to prospective students. Facts, in audience research terms, require adequate sample sizes (1000 in this study) and sound methodology, such that one can say with confidence that a given result would be repeated if the study were repeated. I’ll highlight a few of those facts in the paragraphs to follow, and what they might mean for the continuing development of the UNL website.

First, as the title of the paper suggests, the idea that users don’t read long-form text online, repeated so often that it’s attained a Gospel status, is debunked, at least for this audience. Please, read on.

79 percent of respondents said they would “read it all, even scroll,” to see the information on admissions details and deadlines on a university website. 80 percent said that content (“the content presented on a college or university Web site is more important than how it looks”) is more important than design (“the look and feel of a school site is more important than what I find to read”).

Second, the content has to be correct, helpful and up-to-date … 57 percent of respondents at the prospect stage said they would, in fact, probably take a school off their list if the content was “out of date, incorrect, or unhelpful.”

On social networking, students were generally receptive to schools’ involvement in social media, with 70 percent saying that schools should maintain presences within existing social media sites like Facebook, and 75 percent saying that schools should create their own private social networks for invited students (insert plug here for Smart Site Social, a UNL-focused social framework currently under development in University Communications).

I’ve intentionally left out many interesting though less-emphatic percentages, because it’s difficult to say that some of those things are true without caveats. For instance, do prospectives want recruiters to contact them through social media? 51 percent say “yes,” but 46 percent say “no.” That may not be a risk worth taking.

Informal Communications=Web, Formal=Mail?
There’s a table on page 7 of the study, titled ‘Preferred methods for communications,” that I interpret to mean that prospectives want something tangible delivered in the mail if the communication is very important, such as notification of a financial aid award or acceptance. For most other things, including communicating with current students and communicating with faculty, there is a significant preference for online methods. Most interestingly, to me, is the breakdown on the communication task “getting answers to my questions.” 34 percent prefer to use online methods for that broadly general purpose, and another 60 percent prefer in-person or telephone communications, presumably interpreting the communication task indicated by the question as more personal and unique. Only four percent said they preferred to “get answers to my questions” via mail.

There’s more here of interest, and I invite you to read: Scrolling Toward Enrollment: Web Site Content and the E-Expectations of College-Bound Seniors

There are basically five areas that make up most of the primary navigation color coded as follows:

Red text – About the College/General Information
Green text – Students
Blue text – Faculty and Staff
Purple text – Departmental Info/Centers and Programs
Orange text – Alumni

The departments are listed first in alphabetical order showing their main navigation links color coded from the above list. Then the main areas (About, Students, etc.) are presented showing all the various sublinks that are found among all the colleges to show an all encompassing list of what everyone currently has down to the sublink navigation level.

Finally, at the very bottom of the document are a few miscellaneous primary navigation items that are unique to one or two colleges each.

Hopefully, by analyzing this information colleges and perhaps departments can use it to make decisions to help create more consistency with colleagues across campus. The goal being to create intuitive navigation structures that users are able to grasp quickly when moving between various colleges and departments within the UNL web environment.

As these things go, though, not everyone who is interested in the subject can show up to a given meeting, and a number of university faculty, staff and students are simply out of town for the summer. So I’ve made the presentation available here as an MP4 video (complete with stammering narration). Thanks for your interest, and I look forward to your continuing engagement in the development of UNL.edu.

The “Design Survey” and “UNL.edu and You” were programmed to move seamlessly from an internally-developed instrument to the LimeSurvey-based UNL.edu and You (thanks, Brett); users simply kept clicking through. The significant interest in the redesign process translated to a strong response to UNL.edu and You that we may not have been able to attract otherwise; nearly 4,000 people ended up completing both surveys.

Surveys of this type are not a “vote;” they’re an opportunity for users to provide input to, and influence, a group of professionals from across campus whose expertise lies in communication, visual design and user interface and interaction design. The survey was intended to provide focus to the final ‘leg’ of the journey from 50 designs to one … the distillation of best elements from three designs to one design over the span of a single month.

Qualitative results, especially, had to be interpreted, as there are almost as many conflicting opinions as there are opinions. It was the first order of business for the final design team to identify broad themes in the qualitative responses.

It was the job of the design committee to discuss, argue and implement (yes, in some cases also reject) those opinions. Whether or not a UNL.edu and You respondent sees a specific response to their issue in the final design, the feedback led to spirited debate and discussion that in all cases improved the final product. If you took the time and effort to provide feedback to us, thank you.

Design Quantitative
Design Qualitative
UNL.edu and You