New Open UBC site

By Rie Namba on August 26, 2019 in UBCO, UBCV, Updates

The new Open UBC site has launched today on Aug 26, Monday morning.

Goals for the site relaunch

There were three goals for the site relaunch. We wanted to:
  • Broaden the site focus by including Open Access and Open Research as major themes of the site, since they are important component of the open scholarship movement.
  • Include and point to resources that are available on other UBC websites.
  • Improve the user experience of the site so that the resources are easily accessible by faculty members, students and staff who are interested in open scholarship.

Process

May 2018 – Usability Testing

poster of open ubc website UX session

Poster of Open UBC Website Review (by Rie Namba, CC by SA 3.0)

On May 22, 2018, we hosted a small usability test event for the Open UBC site. During the usability testing, we asked participants to bring their own device (for ex: laptop, tablet, mobile) and go through the user testing survey provided. Two faculty members, one undergraduate student, one graduate student and one staff participated the usability testing event. Overall, we found out from the usability testing that:
  • Some users were confused with some of the terminology of the websites (For example: Open Practice).
  • Some users had hard time finding resources due to the structure of the landing pages.
Many users accessed the “Project” (now it is called “Examples”) page to see what their colleagues were creating. Learning from the feedback we received during the usability testing, we aimed to create a new website that is more simple and improves user experience.

Oct 2018 – Card Sorting Activity

card sorting activity

photograph from the Card Sorting Activity (by Rie Namba -CC by SA 3.0)

On Oct 2018, with a small group from the Library and CTLT (Erin Fields, Cindy Underhill, Will Engle, Lucas Wright and Rie Namba), we designed the new architecture for the new Open UBC site, and did a “card sorting activity” to map out existing pages in the Open UBC site to the new architecture. As a result, we had gaps with resources in Research, Data, and Access sections.

March 2019- Sprint

On March 2019, we organized a sprint and invited a group of expertise (Erin Fields, Stephanie Savage, Rie Namba, Will Engle,  Leonora Crema, Matthew Vis-Dumbar, Sarah Parker, Alex Kuskowski, Eirian Vining)  to create a “Get Started” page for “Research” “Data” and “Access”. The summary of the sprint can be found in the wiki page below: Open UBC Website Sprint March 2019

March 2019 ~ Aug 26 – Iteration

During this period of time, we worked on an iteration of the new Open UBC site. We asked feedbacks for the new Open UBC site from the Open UBC Working Group , which is a working group that supports emerging and ongoing open projects at UBC and beyond. We then edited the new Open UBC site according to the feedback.

Give us Feedback and Contribute to the Open UBC site

If you are excited about contributing to the Open UBC site, there are various ways that you can contribute to the site:  

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