by Chris Newson on September 24, 2008
in TSR News
As some of you will have read in the last blog entry, one of our mods, Blackhawk, came into the TSR office a couple of weeks ago while I was interning there to discuss the future of the careers section of TSR and how we could develop it.
We are already making headway with some of this, and have recently opened a CV Help section: CV Writing help where people can submit their CV for review by our team of CV helpers.
We are also trialling a new recruitment scheme for moderators in Careers, whereby members can nominate other members who they think would be ideal candidates for modship within that area. See the announcement at the top of careers for more details: Guidelines on how to get CV help
More details on the development of Careers on the way from Blackhawk!
Fleur
Everyone uses TSR very differently and thats inevitable when you have a userbase as diverse as ours with students aged 14 doing their GCSEs through to postgrads well into their 20s. This is one of the reasons we are working to make the site more more customisable.
As well as the customisation, when we develop new features and consider design we try to visualise different persona’s to consider how different groups of users will respond to features.
Examples could be:
A 14 year old female GCSE student
A 17 year old male science based A-level student
A 19 year old undergrad doing law
we can picture these persona’s in our heads while considering design or usability. If we like we can talk in funny accent and wear hats to get in character while doing this…but this is optional.
A classic example is terminology, we are still very guilty of using quite geeky or jargony terminology on the site to describe things.
Our persona number 1, the 14 year old GCSE student for example may not understand what the term ‘widget’ means and perhaps she’d not understand ‘thread’ either unless she’d used other forums.
The Student Room is an all inclusive site for students so we need to make it as user friendly as possible so with our next update we’ll be making a few changes to some terminology.
One I like that seems so obvious in hindsight is instead of ‘My Links’ we’ll call the collection of user preferred links ‘Bookmarks’. Makes sense when its pointed out doesn’t it and the name communicates that those links can be edited and added to which is lost on some users currently.
Its also important to do usability testing face to face with people who represent the best fit of our persona’s once we have made changes. We’ll go through that exercise in a month or two after the next round of customisation features and design tweaks goes live.
The blog has been a bit neglected for the past few weeks but we’ll be getting on track with it again from here on with some updates of whats to come and whats been going on in the busy past few weeks.
Good luck those of you off to uni!
–J
