July 2008

I’ve been putting together the documentation for two of our future site updates – customisable homepage and alternative coloured templates. This involves writing in fine detail how these bit of functionality should look and work, passing these briefs to our designer and web developers and then discussing how, by who, and when it will be delivered.

On the updated version of the homepage users will be able to opt to show just the functionality they wish to see, remove or minimise functional elements and drag them around the screen to position them. As part of this update we have to turn the existing homepage functionality into ‘widgets’, like those seen in the side bar. We’ll also be looking to enhance some of the existing homepage functionality by giving users the means to configure the settings of the homepage widgets, for example show how many elements they want, or show items from just the forums the users are interested in.

For the colour templates we are going to initially produce six options which users can choose from by clicking on the ‘customise’ link on the page. Among the choices they’ll definitely be a darker template and a pinky option.

As with any updates to functionality when you start looking into detail about implementation lots of issues and questions are thrown up so there have been several chats in the office and late night calls onto our developers to talk around the issues. The functionality is looking really good and we are looking at having this available for users before the summer is out.

I had an interesting meeting with a large organisation who provide health information last week. They are interested in working with us to communicate their health awareness messages to students. Topics on their communication agenda range from emergency contraception to the demystification of the cervical cancer vaccination. What made the meeting interesting was that rather than just providing static information pages this potential partner are keen to engage with students through interactive page elements and may even provide one to one chats with health professionals. Early days but all very cool stuff that our users could find useful.

All around the country students will be beginning to get apprehensive about exam results day. We at TSR HQ are getting a little twitchy too. The period around results day is the busiest time on the site and this year we anticipate over 100,000 visits a day during the peak of Clearing. For the past few months we’ve been getting the site ready for this massive surge in visitor levels, making sure that the site can cope with the volume but also working to produce some useful resources for people who have just got their results and may be confused their options.

 Our 2008 Clearing homepage is coming on nicely and the articles seen there have been written by a number of our users. We’ve been asking students who’ve been through the Clearing process to share their Clearing Experiences and thanks to Mustard Man for the most recent addition there. As always our ‘What take to university’ articles continue to grow – I hope they are making student halls bigger these days to accomadate this stuff :)

We hope you’re enjoying your summer break assuming you are off school/college/uni now.

- J

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A swan glides majestically across a river only because its legs are working frantically underwater.  Thin bird legs aren’t ideal for moving 7.5kg of feather and flight muscle across a body of flowing water.  This week it became clear that the relaxed, easy going nature of the office hid the frantic legs kicking away keeping the site moving.

Now I have a confession to make, those adverts that are annoying you, following you around trying to convince you that you really do want to book cheap hotel rooms  or that you want nothing more than to complete your studies in Southend (if you aren’t a sub at least) I’m responsible for them. Some of them anyway, advert management is a huge job and I can’t emphasise that enough:  They’re fiddly to set up. They have to be carefully targeted according to fairly exacting requests from the person buying the advert which is fiddly. When not enough people click on an advert (you need to monitor all the adverts to make sure they are doing ok which is fiddly and time consuming)  you have to try and work out why that particular advert is doing badly in relative terms; fiddly and seldom obvious.  You then have to go and change how that advert is targeted (which is fiddly) whilst avoiding a situation where….etc. etc.

It’s what RK spend s a good chunk of his time doing when he isn’t analysing site usage, drawing up spreadsheets planning the distribution upcoming advertising campaigns, answering the phone, sorting out subscriptions on coursework.info…. etc. etc.

It seems to be a reoccurring theme in this post that it’s not worth finishing paragraphs, as describing anyone’s jobs or indeed any major task in any depth turns what’s supposed to be an interesting blog into a huge list. The fact is there’s a lot to do, typical office hours seem to be 9 till 6 every day (although often we work later) with a working lunch break.  Unusually we spent today’s lunch outside the office, in a rather good Thai restaurant, however, for the most part the conversation was business and J took down notes as we went.

It’s Wii night tonight (friday) though so the speakers will thunder out discordant twanging as we try and fail to play Raining Blood on Guitar hero.  Ironically the office will seem it’s most frantic when we’re all relaxing.

- Nefarious

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Spending the summer on the British south coast, for many years holiday destination of choice for the nation, what could possibly go wrong…

Quite a lot actually it seems, for a start no one seems to have told the weather that it’s supposed to be summer, on arrival I was greeted by leaden skies, torrential rain and I was almost blown out to sea on two separate occasions; and there’s been no real improvement since. I was cheerfully informed as I was shown around my flat that if I turned the oven off the wrong way it would kill me and that the night before my arrival there had been a party in the building that lasted until six am. Not only that but my landlady doesn’t allow shoes in the flat and had left me a list of do’s and don’ts three pages long…

The flat itself is lovely, plenty of space, plenty of light, or at least there would be plenty, if the sun was ever out, and it’s in a nice area, very nice in fact. There’s a park opposite with tennis courts a bowls club and a play park that hasn’t been vandalised yet.

This week at work has been a fairly gentle start , as well as helping with the day to day running of the site I’ve had one or two projects too work on too. The first of these is improving communication between Acumen and the users of the site, in certain quarter’s members don’t feel listened to and hearing that Acumen have put me on the case. The second, which you’ll see more of on Monday is an update to the site rules which as they stand are an unwieldy behemoth and an intimidating prospect for anyone to read. The new version which J and the mods have put a lot of effort into is clearer, easier to read and reaffirms Acumen’s commitment to a friendly, inclusive and welcoming site.

There’s a relaxed atmosphere in the office, music plays in the background and banter is thrown around, a white board in the corner gives scores for various challenges involving paper planes, the office Nintendo Wii and an inflatable football. I’m settling in nicely and really enjoying myself. As I type the sun has even come out.

- Nefarious

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We’re pleased to welcome one of our Moderators, Nefarious, into our offices in Brighton today to start an internship with us for a few months.

Nefarious will be working on some of the day to day aspects of TSR whilst also getting to grips with some heavy duty project work. Later into July we will be happy to have our second intern join us, Fleur de Lis.

We are keen to let them both see how things operate and we will benefit hugely from having their experience as long term users and moderators available to us. We’ll give you an update on their keepy uppy scores once they have their feet properly under the desk

- J

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Back in January of this year we conducted a large survey on The Student Room, we asked what sort of functionality and features users would like to see and we gauged opinion on some of our own ideas. We received around 1200 completed surveys from Guests, members and subscribers.

Around the same time we also did the following:

• Usability testing with students of all ages who don’t use the site
• Usability testing with relatively new site users
• Usability testing with long time site users 
• A Moderator focus group
• A user Focus group session
• Google Analytics for site activity analysis 
• We spoke to our advertisers and partners 
• We consulted with other forum owners/Admins

The output of all this work combined with the ongoing feedback we receive in our About forum enabled us to identify what hasn’t been working so well on the site and put plans together for where we go from here.

There were reoccurring themes with what our users told us they wanted. Customisation and personalisation in particular and matched what users in About have been telling us since the 2007 redesign asking for skins and the ability to have the site how they want it.

Last Wednesday we took the first steps towards this more customisable TSR

We launched content ‘widgets’ that users could opt into showing within a right hand side bar. Now for example, a user can have their Quotes with them all the time should they wish to, or they can have an RSS feed from another website they regularly visit. We plan to develop a nice catalogue of useful widgets.

The next steps with customisation will be full homepage customisation so you can opt to display just what you want and colour themes so you can choose to have the site coloured one of several options. This will be coming in a few months time.

As part of Wednesdays update we also addressed some of the other issues that were highlighted in the usability testing we conducted, so the position of our tabs at the top is now different and more usable some of the section naming have changed also to be me intuitive.

If you’re having problems with the site since these changes, if you’d like to make a suggestion for a new widget use the appropriate threads in the About Forum: http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=5

- J

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