Recently we’ve been lining up a few cool things which I want to share. Not massive things, no new services with bells and whistles, not even a shiny new design to look at. No, today’s changes are all about little things which most of people won’t notice, but which makes everyone’s lives a bit easier.
First of all, we’re beginning to push our Get Satisfaction feedback tabs onto more services. These delightful little tabs come in a variety of colours (depending on the service you’re using), but all live on the left hand side of the page and give you a pop-up feedback window from where you can tell us your questions, ideas, problems or praise. The whole thing is smoothly integrated with your University account so there’s no need to register again, and we really do value (and listen to, and reply to) everything we hear. Give it a click if you want to tell us something.
Secondly, we’re acting on some feedback! A few of you (read: a lot of you) have complained about the weird sign in page for our Wi-Fi network which forced you to click the ‘I Accept’ button instead of just hitting enter. You’ll be pleased to hear that we’re changing that, and you should see the results either today or tomorrow.
With Freshers’ Week looming over the horizon, I’m led back to memories of when I first arrived at Lincoln. I very quickly learnt that the best way to find out anything important was to grab someone in a neon yellow Fresher Helper t-shirt and ask.
This led me to wonder “why don’t University departments do that?”. In all seriousness, it works for Apple stores. Put people in uniform, even if it’s literally a coloured t-shirt with the University logo on the front and “ICT” on the back and I bet you’ll get an increase in queries. Make the support available right there on the front line, never mind tucking it away at the back of a building somewhere staffed by a nondescript bloke whose only association with the University is the ID badge he’s got clipped to his belt.
Recently I’ve been looking at some exciting new changes which might be in the pipeline for the IT helpdesk, namely replacing our old and somewhat rickety system with a new, shiny SAAS one.
Aside from the savings of £14 bazillion pounds a month this will make (which I may have exaggerated, but it will save us money) and the fact it’s a simply better service, not to mention the way it’s web based with mobile clients so support techs can use it anywhere, its support of elegant automated workflow processing, better information capture and integration with everything else we use; it’s a very social piece of software.
We’ve currently got it working in such a way so that if you send us a problem over Twitter we can seamlessly pull it into the system, deal with it, and respond. You need never know what’s happening behind the scenes, all you know is that we’re handling your problem. However, what we need to know is more than just your Twitter handle – we need to know your full name, your student ID number, which course you’re on and various other things so that we can actually solve the problem. There’s also the fact that anybody can email the helpdesk from any account which produces this same problem. We know exactly who you are if you use your student email account, but we struggle to know who xx_bubble_princess_xx_28463 is.
Further to the revelation that there are students out there capable of voicing an opinion, we now have to deal with the resulting fallout. At this point I need to quote Joss, the nice man from CERD, who likened my approach to IT support to this:
Whilst I’m tempted to staple this notice to the front of the helpdesk and watch confused students ask “will you really set us on fire?”, it’s actually better to deal with stupid questions by documenting your response, on the basis that the universe never ceases to provide a constant stream of the terminally confused, people who don’t bother to read the dialog box which pops up with important information and clear instructions, and people who believe that the helpdesk are there to actually operate the computer on their behalf.
The University’s strategic plans have a lot of things along the lines of “Imagine the {person} of 2012”, I suspect with the notion of dragging departments kicking and screaming into the 21st century whether they want to come or not. Here’s the one from the Strategic Plan Overview (actually quite a good read) on what the student of 2012 should be like:
I already know the people in my apartment. The University connected us through Facebook and a few of us went out for the night before we even enrolled.
I had my timetable, accommodation, Students’ Union Guide and University Handbook all emailed to me – I even enrolled online.
I knew the competition for places was tough because of the University of Lincoln’s reputation. The facilities are fantastic, award-winning buildings right in the heart of the city.
People here think outside the box. We’ve already had lectures in some cool places. All the buildings seem to have really sociable spaces, comfy chairs, places to meet and interact. It is a 24-7 place, totally wi-fi and networked.
Our lecturer has been doing joint research at a partner university in India. She is at the forefront of her subject and she’s teaching me!
Next week we have got workplace practitioners coming to talk to us and I have even had the careers people asking me about my ‘mobile portfolio of skills’ and how I might develop them. I have got an idea for a business so I am going to talk to the people at Sparkhouse, the University’s enterprise incubator.
All this in the first few weeks.
Cool, awesome, great… you’ve invented the student of 2010 two years late!
Update regarding the state of emails: I’ve not heard official words from IT on the state of play of the email server, however my account (which was out yesterday) is now back in action. I’m guessing this is a good thing.
Today, along with 1/3 of the other staff and students at Lincoln, I’ve been devoid of emails. This is down to a problem with one of the three email stores at the University, and includes staff accounts beginning with letters A, B, M-O and V-Z along with a third of student accounts (pretty much at random). People are working on fixing it. You can keep up to date with it on Get Satisfaction.
Oddly enough this has let me spend a couple of hours working on stuff without being distracted by people asking silly questions. Instead I’ve been looking at the user interface tweaks necessary to encompass some changes to the student halls network access controller, and thinking more about the dream of a common design and components for web services.
Put simply myself (along with my partner in crime, Alex) have been throwing ideas backwards and forwards for a couple of weeks now on the subject of a single coherent way into all of Lincoln’s web services, inventively dubbed my.lincoln. The idea is of a single website which collects and collates everything you might need to know from the myriad of services as well as letting you fine-tune how they work for you.
The current ‘gateway’ style used by Online Services.
As a part of this (once I’d beaten another kink out of how Vista behaves with PFMPC ((Print From My PC))) I began mucking around with some CSS, aiming to throw together a layout based on something Alex mocked up. The old ‘gateway’ style in use in several places is actually quite messy behind the scenes, is extraordinarily narrow, and doesn’t provide much flexibility. You can put buttons at the top, and then a load of text.
There is also a ‘new gateway’ style which I knocked out for PFMPC which fundamentally looks the same (or at least very similar) but which is completely standards compliant with the exception of some little bits of CSS. However, this still has the problems of being narrow, a bit dull, and lacking in anything which makes you go “wow, this is a great, well designed web service”.
Which is why Alex and myself decided a change was needed. Something wider, faster, cleaner, smarter, more flexible, more appealing, ready for Web 2.0, ready for single-sign-on, accessible, standards-compliant and ready for use in every browser we could think of (including Lynx, and even including IE6). We’ve nicknamed it the “Common Web Design” in the vague hopes that the name will explain what it should be used for and people can latch on to the idea.
The very first version of the CWD.
Along with this will come a set of guidelines on how to write content for the CWD so that everything clicks together nicely. The whole thing is specifically designed to be portable between services (perhaps using the c.lincoln.ac.uk storage location for CSS, images and JavaScript). More importantly I feel that the CWD is a deliberate disconnect from the old look and feel. Things using the design won’t be a re-hash of the old systems with the same quirks, they will be ground-up redesigns with goals of ease-of-use and interoperability explicitly in mind.
This is very much a work in progress and probably won’t ever be seen in the wild, but we can hope. Ideally I’d like to get the design finished and roll it out for PFMPC and LUNA to help spread the message that ‘things are changing’, but since I’ve mostly done this in my own time and off my own back I may surprise people.
Get Satisfaction is getting its first public airing on a mass distribution tomorrow morning when the student email goes out. In preparation, I’ve knocked up this crash course on how to post topics, reply, get signed up and tweak your preferences and personalisation.
This particular version is aimed at students (although should provide a good grounding for staff wanting to get involved), a more in-depth staff-friendly one will be along in a day or so with more detail on things like moderation.
Now that the University has some Get Satisfaction support goodness going on, there are all kinds of cool widgets we can use to integrate the support community with other websites. The Blogs help page sports a “Feedback” tab on the left hand side of the window, powered by Get Satisfaction. My other blog has a page explaining about what I do as a Student Rep, and includes a feedback widget right in the middle of the page. In fact it’s so easy to do that here’s an example of our most recent active topics, embedded into the middle of a blog post.
Hang on a second, communicating with the mothership…
Clever, huh? If you’ve got a site which is relevant to the University and you’re wanting to get hold of a widget to expand your direct support methods then just let me know!
Sadly, my efforts to make wtf.lincoln.ac.uk the official address for our Get Satisfaction account weren’t successful, despite receiving widespread support. We are, however, now sporting a brand new and shiny URL at http://wwh.lincoln.ac.uk. The WWH stands for What, Why and How which neatly encompasses a lot of the things which Get Satisfaction will be dealing with. Other suggestions included huh.lincoln.ac.uk (as in “Huh? What?”) and a variety of “eh” and “umm” derivatives.
However, we also have some good news in that we now completely support Get Satisfaction! We can properly moderate conversation to keep it relevant, make sure the Student Reps get recognised, keep people up to date easier and more! Expect to see more news about this through some more channels soon, but if you want to tell anybody to use Get Satisfaction (or What, Why, How) then please feel free.
Okay, it’s been a while, so here’s a roundup of what’s going on in the land of Nick.
Get Satisfaction
My never-ending quest to get the University using Get Satisfaction seems to be nearing an end with the news that we will very soon (Monday!) be getting on the basic level of subscription services. This brings all kinds of cool new stuff to the service, including more moderation tools (so we can keep the conversation relevant and better manage how we respond to things), the ability to flag student reps as awesome (so more people listen to them), extra branding opportunities (so you know it’s about Lincoln), more widgets (for letting people use Get Satisfaction from within other sites) and most importantly the support of the University!
Now all we need is a cool name. So far thoughts include feedback.lincoln.ac.uk, thoughts.lincoln.ac.uk, qipp.lincoln.ac.uk, comments.lincoln.ac.uk and my personal favourite (although highly unlikely) wtf.lincoln.ac.uk – anybody got any more ideas or preferences? Let me know.
Print From My PC
Our ‘wireless printing’ service is still on track for a week 6 soft launch, although we’re experiencing some interesting glitches with printing from Ubuntu and other Linux flavours since they don’t trust our certificate provider. Kirsty took a brief wander around the library to work out where we could put posters advertising the service and you should hopefully see them appearing soon (so that you can break things and complain at us).
Lincoln University Network Access
This is a new one – LUNA is the name for an updated network access controller which will be rolling out to Student Village after the Christmas break. It includes improved security, better guidance on what to do when things go wrong, and (best of all) redesigned pages so you still feel like you’re within the University. Guess who’s been tasked with dismantling the existing pages, figuring out how they work and redesigning them all? Yup, it’s me!
All in all it’s a load of exciting things going on here in ICT. Hopefully once Get Satisfaction is working I can get cracking on another Service 2.0 thing (I want to see if there’s something I can do with the helpdesk…), there are some big enhancements to timetabling floating around in the cloud, and there’s a huge (and I mean huge) set of changes to student communications in the pipeline.
