Tag Archives for UX

Participation & Community Interactivity

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Why are people participating?

  • This is a “community of interest” — like a class, a set of organizers has pre-existing buy-in to the project.

Barriers to entry: know-how [can be solved pedagogically] and willingness to participate [community status can be leveraged]

  • How-to and friendly reminders shared with team regularly
  • Participation of others increases willingness for participation of the reluctant

Interactivity as part of the process

  • Making many people participate in blogging by asking each committee to blog once a month
  • Some people love it, and were in there commenting imediately, other people had to be put on a schedule to post on the blog

 

Agility in Site Development

THEORY: When design is agile, we’ve produced “less than” and not taken too many ideas into the mix, stayed within or below scope, waited for users to respond to product, not overdeveloped before getting user information.

For example, the previous website was a Joomla! build from former developer, heavy and not accessible by anyone who didn’t know the Joomla! CMS [not that the designer was willing to share a login, but anyway].

How was this development agile?

  1. The first web presence implementation was just one HTML page [no screenshot available] — just getting the Save The Date and conference theme “out there” [and collecting SEO on the URL]
  2. Second was Twenty10 WP theme [the default theme] with a header and a few pages — just getting the Call for Submissions forms up and public without any major design work
  3. Third implementation of WP Page Lines framework theme with more design, bells n whistles — adding in pages that were requested, more attractive design, and integrating social media presence.

Non-agile ideas that were researched and discarded:

Radical Pedagogy

Theory: Seeing the connections between participant’s senses of Self-ownership, Responsibility to the project/process, and Horizontal Power

–       need systems that reinforce everyone’s power within the system: including people who think they “don’t know how to use the system”

–       Horizontal power is reinforced where there is leadership on the process and people who are resources, but no one owner

–       Ex: Google Forms instead of web forms, everyone had to learn to make them themselves [and that was a challenge for some folks], but now have power over shutting form down, control of info in form, access to applicants instantly, etc.

Community Participation:

The Femme Conference project has a built-in, existing community of 14 core organizers and about 35 total organizers who would be interacting with this media, either by creating blog posts, content for the web pages, or using the social media to let people know about the conference.

There is an additional community of several hundred people who will be visiting the site for information on participating in the the conference at performers, workshop presenters and attendees.

Theory: We had to pick a technology that community members would be familiar with and comfortable using that also allowed for the needed organization and dissemination of data.

Theory bonus: Organization and Dissemination are two of the three aspects of power-shifting digital technology, the other being production