2019-01-25 Design core team Meeting notes

Date

Jan 25, 2019

Participants

Present:

  • @Cynthia Schwarz (Unlicensed)

  • @Jennifer Anton

  • @Rachel Cox (Unlicensed)

  • @Chris Doyle

  • @Gabe Galson

Not Present:

  • @David Lacy

  • @Jackie Sipes

Goals

  • Events

  • Mini Homepages/landing pages

  • Primary navigation

Discussion topics

Notes

Notes

Events Feed

  • Similar to how the events feed looks now, we’ll have filtering on the left column, events in the middle, exhibits on the right

  • Talked with communication team about their preferences for filtering, etc.

    • Talked about an ‘audience’ filter, but this felt like it implied an exclusivity

    • Filter by category - Kaitlyn has 20+ in the calendar, but the filter will only show categories that are used on the current/future events.

  • Removing the “free and open to all” because not all events fall into this

  • “View past events” will be a similar page, but will say “past events”.

  • Question: do we want a page to display past exhibits since we will have these stored in the database?

  • Buttons under each one will display the event type and location.

    • If you click on the button, the behavior will be similar to if you filtered on the left

  • Exhibits are entered manually into a model in rails

    • Top right exhibit show what it looks like to hover over

  • Question: Can we not use check boxes for the filters?

    • Chris and Rachel will discuss this

Landing Pages (FKA Mini homepage)

  • Ambler campus search box - would be the main library search, not pre-faceted to anything

  • Collections on the SCRC page will have an image

  • MAN-50_rev2

    • I like the header image

    • I like the hours being displayed directly in the page

  • SCRC - what did Margery want? - Cynthia go back to notes from meeting with Margery last fall.

  • TODO: Merge landing page tasks into one epic instead of multiple epics

Primary Navigation

  • benefits of a drop-down menu

    • more links off the homepage

    • we don’t have to redirect people to a separate page - instead they can get a preview of the content in a section

    • You can be in an unrelated part of the website, skip the landing page to get to a sub-page

    • NN/Group’s advice: reserve screen space and are an expected website feature

  • Reservations about drop-down menus

    • will need to have javascript turned on - not based on HTML and CSS

    • there’s a lot that goes into designing them well for the site

    • it’s a convenience feature that doesn’t give you a lot of added value

    • need to be simple if we’re going to use them

    • clunky on mobile devices - has to be modified

  • Accessibility

    • Can a tabbed reader still read a drop-down?

  • This is really a conversation about the information architecture and not the design

    • Maybe this needs to be handled by web content strategy group

For next week

  • review revised layouts for landing pages

  • do individual research on drop-downs to contribute to the decision making once we have the content strategy in place

Action items

@Cynthia Schwarz (Unlicensed) create Jiras for coding the events/exhibit index pages
@Rachel Cox (Unlicensed) will create additional version of the landing pages for next week
@Cynthia Schwarz (Unlicensed) will merge all of the landing pages into one epic in Jira
Web Content Strategy group will come up with the site structure/info architecture to inform site architecture
Design group will do research on pros/cons to drop-down menus

Decisions