Rapid development documents and Ajax style skills search

The SkillClouds Rapid development cycle page has now been updated with documentation on our wireframes, screen shots, videos and working prototypes of the functionality for the project.

As the first of a few blog posts we are going to tell you a little bit about how we coded some of the functionality the users requested, starting with searching the tag cloud.

During the SkillClouds pilot stage there was a desire by users to use a search box rather than scanning through a list of tags.

The approach :
SkillCloud displays all the user's skills on the page already, so rather than any database search of the user's skills we implemented a DOM search.

Now you see it, now you don't :
The Blacktree application Quicksilver uses a display mechanism in searching for files in your pc folders. It 'hides' those files which do not match the search criteria you enter.

Now you see it, now you see it 'more' :
Applying this with javascript to an xhtml DOM we can pattern match to a list of items and apply some dynamic 'hightlight' css class to those which match the user's search criteria, giving them emphasis. The code below shows the dynamic javascript css style 'highlight' applied to the tags which match the search for the consecutive letters PR in any tag.



Screenshot 'in-action':
The highlighted tags match the text in the search box in a greedy fashion - here the search is for any tags that contain the letters AN, with the corresponding tags highlighted and enlarged.




As you type more letters, the search is narrowed and a more precise match is shown. Here the search term ANALYSIS shows only those tags containing the the term.





Try it yourself :
Our greedy pattern matching skillclouds search prototype.


Footnote :
Since our implementation Jquery main man John Resig has designed an efficient way of the 'now you see it now you don't' DOM searching called jquery-livesearch which we will be looking at in comparison to our implementation and using if it's more efficient.

SkillClouds: the mini-series

One of the things we want to do with the SkillClouds project is to create outputs that give simple and fun explanations for what the project is all about.

Last night I came across an incredible flash-based web animation tool called Xtranormal. The strap line is "if you can type, you can make movies".

Here is the first episode of the SkillClouds story:




Or you can view it from this Xtranormal page:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20081113180917537

Where we've been for the last two months!

We've been having a busy time at the SkillClouds depot over the last couple of months.

As Stuart described in his recent post, we have just launched a pilot SkillClouds resource for students within Biology and Environmental Sciences.

In September, we presented the SkillClouds project to senior management at the University, and are starting to explore with the University how SkillClouds will be evaluated to decide whether or not it should be developed further and launched here. We had extremely positive feedback from this meeting, and SkillClouds was included on a briefing note for departments at the University outlining some of the initiatives available at Sussex to support students.

A couple of weeks ago, we were invited to the School Management Meeting of a large school here at the University (at Sussex Uni, a school is a group of departments). The group were very keen on SkillClouds and identified that one of its key uses would be to support academic staff in discussing future careers with students in Academic Advising sessions. Several departments asked whether they could be part of the pilot.

John has created a screencast of our presentation.

One of the unexpected outcomes of these meetings for us was that several academic staff stated that they would find the set of skills within the cloud extremely useful as a tool for them to identify the range of skills that their graduates might be acquiring:

Skillclouds prototyping in Sussex University career development course

The University of Sussex Careers Development and Employment Center (CDEC) is currently using a Skillclouds beta prototype in its course running with second year Biology and Environmental Science students.

Alongside a moodle course, developed by CDEC, Skillclouds will provide resources for the students' first assignment during the course.



We are quite excited about this and hoping to get some valuable feedback from both the tutors and the students on the course.

SkillClouds presentation at ALT-C 2008 ..

We presented a short paper on the SkillClouds project at ALT-C 2008 in Leeds this week. The conference theme was "digital divide" and we tried to address this in our presentation by looking at skills from an institutional and an individual/student perspective. Full details at: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=altc2008

This paper drew on three main pieces of work from the project:

• our user centred design sessions with students (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/pilot_stage.php#user_centred_design for a brief summary and a link to the full report)
• the card sorting activities and resulting analysis (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/pilot_stage.php#card_sorting for further details)
• our early work on the prototype
  

Head on over to the SkillClouds site and check us out!

Skillclouds - a user journey

We have now added a user journey through skills to our Skillclouds Pilot Stage.

This user journey is based on the building of knowledge on top of what the user already knows, with stages acting to reinforce or reaffirm knowledge, and offering more in depth information if the user requests it.

Users can access parts at any stage, building up the tools to reach their own individual journey goal.

The next project stage details the 'interaction needs' of the user in the delivery of this information. We will be documenting wireframes, prototypes and a rapid development cycle of user testing the interface.

Open card sorting

Stuart here - i'm the new team member, and this is my first blog.

When is it too early to start user testing ? never would be my answer.

Let your users guide and lead the development rather then presenting them with a product and then 'tweaking' it till it's possible for them to use. Retro development of adding features to an already formed system will always prove more difficult than having the right starting place and initial plan before beginning any code or programming.

That is just one of the reasons why i liked the approach to SkillClouds and their aim for user centered design when i arrived.

From the initial stages of user research, stakeholder interviews and group sessions there had been a great deal of information gathered as to needs of the users, institution, jisc and ideas as to how the project should fulfill these.

Interviews gave us proof of concept information

"After thinking about it for a while I realized that I could only come up with about three skills I acquire at University and that is with the physics department always telling us what skills a physics degree gives us. I am therefore convinced that students from other parts of the campus have the same difficulties if not worse."

"students don't really know what their skills are so telling them without them specifically having to look for this information would give them a big boost in motivation."

And plenty of ideas for what was needed from SkillClouds

"when you click or hover over a skill a short paragraph will appear on the same page outlining the general meaning of the skill."

"I wouldn't always want to open a new window and then having to read through a long essay to get a simple and short description of the skill,"

" .. more in-depth on skills. What else was there? Describing the skill, alternate words .."

"see how they’re transferable and maybe have a link to what kind of jobs they do "

"I mean on that web site you’re linking to your marks and everything as well so you could tie them in, right? […] So in “Essay 1 for Toy Design” you used your communication skills, so you click on that and it’ll give you your mark and an outline of what the report was or whatever. Cos then you could have that going through like all of your years and you could use it as a reference to say “Right, I’ve got communication skills from my 1st year in Toy Design” – and you’re in your 3rd year you’ve got to go back to what sort of skill sets you got."

"It could be useful as well to have feedback from your tutors as well, where you could have improved or things like that, that could"

After a series of user experience data-mining sessions based on analysis, transcripts and recordings of the Pilot Stage and Tag Cloud Navigation Strategies two semi-distinct types of user requirement for SkillClouds emerged :

1. Information
2. Presentation

Having constructed a list of users information goal statements we continued the user centered design process in order to define the information needs of the user, give them structure, order and explore how users saw the types of information SkillClouds might offer them.

9 Students were recruited through Facebook and the SkillClouds mailing list to take part in an open card sorting exercise. The results of even such a small sample group gave us a very strong steer for the development of our information architecture, how users saw the information, what information they want/need and how it should be how/why it should be delivered.

A description, some photos and the initial output of the card sorting is now up on the SkillClouds project website here.

We are currently mapping out a user journey based on the card sorting output which will evolve into our user driven design for SkillClouds.