All right, while we're getting started here, just I'm curious.  Whoa. Look at that. Awesome. All right, wait.  Yeah, all right. Well, welcome everybody. And I have the pleasure of welcoming you to DrupalCon New Orleans as a local. I live in Baton Rouge. As evidence proof that I'm truly a local, there's my man Murray. He's wearing his Mardi Gras beads at the crew of Mutts Parade in Baton Rouge. Just to check the technology, here's a gratuitous shot of Murray as a puppy. All right, it's working. Puppies. Cool. So I also work with the Louisiana Drupal User Group. We organize Drupal Camp New Orleans. Keep an eye out. We will hopefully have another one this fall. We didn't do one this spring because we had this event. If you are nearby, we meet the first Thursday of every month here at Launchpad. You're welcome to join us. I'm Jeff. Nice to meet you guys. Thanks for coming today. I work at Media Current. I'm in charge of our professional services, the work we do for our clients. I also help manage our work with LSU up in Baton Rouge. In part because I live right down the street, and I'm also a proud alum. We've got the backpack right over there with the logo on it, right? The Arkansas fans on our team would probably say I'm a little too proud. I'm here representing the work of a great team. I'm not going to talk a lot about coding things. They did all the heavy lifting and work, so I wanted to acknowledge some of the great things that they did here. The platform they've built helps me to sit down with the client every Wednesday, go meet with my friend there. Together, we can solve most of the needs for unique content without having to go back and code things at this point on this platform. As the team will attest, keeping me out of code is a good idea. About Media Current, Media Current is focused on creating Drupal websites that accomplish business and brand objectives for organizations. We're a single source partner to provide turnkey solutions and services, development design, strategy support, maintenance testing, whatever you need in Drupal. Here's several of the schools we've worked with, and as you guys all attest, raising your hands, there's a lot of university interest and usage of Drupal. I think one statistic that AQUIA has put out, 71 of the top 100 universities use Drupal in some way. There's definitely a lot to talk about, a lot of usage of Drupal in the higher ed space. For our session today, we'll talk about the site and the project and the client. Again, that I work with at LSU. Talk about some of the challenges we've reigned into and challenges of university projects in general. Though I guess I probably don't have to cover that with y'all. You probably live it every day, right? We'll go through some of the solutions we've provided, and then I do want to leave some time and share some lessons learned from building and supporting site over the years now. And it's a Drupal 7 platform that I'll be talking about, but I do want to cover some of the things that we've already seen or we know are coming in Drupal 8 that we think would have helped. Like if we had only had that back then, right? Some of the fun stuff Dries showed in his keynote, for sure. Some things I won't cover, I'm not going to, intending to talk about the design of the site. It's a bit dated at this point, and that's okay. But not intending for a site review in terms of design or the custom coding. I wanted to suggest this session for the site building track because that's what I really want to talk a lot about is just empowering people to just use Drupal without having to go to the custom coding to solve some of these problems. And I'm hopefully not here to give you guys a media current sales pitch. Be happy to work with any of you, but I'm going to show you some trouble that we've had and how we work through it and things like that as well. Again, the site's been in production for a number of years now, and so we've got some learnings of how it's been used versus what we thought it was going to be. So first, about the site and project. So the specific division and apartment that we work with at LSU is Student Life and Enrollment. So we're not talking about the main lsu.edu site. It's on a different platform, but this is a division that had originally developed their own site, a homegrown solution on Drupal 6, and they did it as a multi-site installation. We came in, helped move it to Drupal 7, update the design, things like that. Cover your eyes, there's some bright colors coming. Here's a before shot. These are some of the departments as they were on Drupal 6. Some of the challenges they had on this platform, it had grown to an unmanageable state. Each department had unique content types within the multi-site. Security releases meant, according to 15 plus deployments, and it needed a design refresh, as you can see, probably. But we can all play the archive.org game and pull up things from our past. So I was the webmaster for Major League Soccer, back in the times when there was such a title as Webmaster. And I think this beauty was built with Microsoft Front Page. Again, keep me out of the code. Putting aside comments about the old design, the platform is for a really nice group of people that work hard for students at LSU. Helping them succeed, bringing the best ones to campus, helping them succeed while they're there, helping them find employment when they graduate. LSU ranks 33rd out of more than 160 research schools for mid-career earnings. That's higher than Alabama, Florida, UNC. You know what? I'm not going to keep going again, that pride thing, right? Again, the student life and enrollment. So some of the departments on the platform that are on Drupal here on campus, their career center, again, helping to place people in careers academic success, which offers all the resources and tools. Students need extra help in an area, need access to tutoring, supplemental instruction, things like that. There's lots of programs, and probably not unique tells you. They like to name programs after the math's gotten some way. So you've got Stripes and PAWS and all that kind of tiger stuff in there for some of the initiatives. And you see Dean of Students and Greek Life. So that's a nice mix for one platform, right? You've got the Dean and Mr. Belushi and others. That's one of the challenges that I want to talk about is the, and I think it is maybe unique to universities, all the different people in the audience that the CMS has to serve, both the website and the people publishing into it, right? The Dean has to get his message out. The students have different needs than the Dean, right? Anybody surprised? You want to debate this, right? Some of the challenges, right? University procurement and purchasing regulations can be a lengthy and restrictive process. Okay, that's maybe a challenge for us on the agency side, but probably for y'all too, right? Trying to get help with your project where you need it and all the things you have to do to justify it. The wide-ranging audience like I talked about, I think it's hard when you have to serve so many constituents with this system to find the right voice for any piece of content and who it's focused for. And then on the other side of it, the administrative side. So using the CMS, and you guys can probably relate, but one challenge that LSU has, the back-end system and how to publish the thing, it's controlled by student workers a lot in some of these departments, and they're gone after a semester or two, and then you got to start the cycle all over again, right? So all kinds of fun challenges. Duplication is another interesting one. Duplication across campus, right? This is anecdotal, but I've read that for much of its history, LSU had three different separate delivery systems for on-campus mail, just to get your mail from one part of the campus together. Doesn't sound right. Here, duplication. A logo, right? It's LSU. One brand, everybody's working together. This took me about five minutes to find all these instances of the different logos that are in use. I like some better than others, but if we can't agree on the logo, imagine how this goes down to the content and the departments and what message we're trying to get out there on any given site, right? But I don't want to pick on LSU the whole time. We're in SEC country. We like to pick on the big 10 down here. Sorry if anybody's from Ohio State, if I'm bringing up old memories here. Here's a sample page. Again, I don't know anything about Ohio State or their mission or the goals of this admissions page. This could serve them very well, right? But just kind of looking at this, and I just chose this one for no particular reason other than picking on the big 10, right?  Now, maybe Ohio State has more applicants since they know what to do with, and it's okay that it's a little bit of a, find your way kind of thing, right? But this is, to me, speaking to some of the challenges with the audience. Who are you publishing this content for? Are you publishing it for the admissions person or the prospective student that needs to use the admissions page? Those are two different goals. An example I can give somewhere we have worked with is Butler. So we worked on Butler's site at Media Current, and the project included a lot of content and digital strategy, so not only just building Drupal to output the website, but really focusing on the goals and the strategy and the messaging that they wanted to convey, doing user research and personas to help uncover what questions does the person that's using this site and reading it, what do they have? What questions do we need to answer on these pages? So this is Butler's admissions page, and the first thing it tries to do is answer the questions that most commonly come out for that, again, prospective student that is comparing schools and considering applying. Am I going to get a job after I graduate? That was the number one that we found. So that first number up there, 95%, that's a great story Butler has to tell. 95% of you that graduate wind up in a job. That's pretty good, right? So that's an example of just the strategy and the results that came out of it and kind of focusing on serving that audience and answering their questions. Butler, as you see here, saw some good numbers, increase in keyword rankings for keywords that I think work well for that university, referral, traffic, bounce rate, all good signs that the investment was worth it. And that's kind of a question to ask or to ask those of your procurement offices, how's your site viewed? Is it an expense? We have to have a website so let's put some stuff on it or is it an investment, right? What are we going to get out of it? Do any of these things sound familiar, right? Having trouble showing the ROI of the site, tracking before and after results, again, is the mindset that this site that we have to have is an expense or are we investing in it? Is there a challenge with leadership buy-in? Understanding, truly understanding the level of effort it takes to create a world-class digital experience. How is it with governance or structure of the platform? Do different departments have autonomy to do whatever they want and create that multi-site monster I was referring to earlier? These are all important challenges to think about. With some important results, right? So if the site's hard to maintain and hard to keep up to date security-wise, you don't want to wind up in the headlines on the side of the screen here with security concerns, right? If it's too hard to make a deployment. Luckily, Drupal's here to help, right? There's plenty of free tools from the community to help build your site and solve these challenges, right? Does anybody want to hear about how WordPress though failed on the LSU campus? Not failed, it is struggling. So my point is, and we'll get into this here in a second, but most any system is technically capable, right? We're here, we like Drupal. WordPress is just fine too. It's how it's configured that can determine its success or failure. Choices that are made along the way as it's being set up. Sometimes very small, seemingly small choices can have a big difference. We'll show you some examples. So one suggestion before we're going to pick and choose the modules in these free tools to build your site. We often see universities writing detailed technical requirements about a system before considering what system will be used. The result of that is you wind up spending an inordinate amount of your time working against that system because before we even thought, hey, we're going to put it on Drupal. We know some readily available tools to use. We're going to write this requirement that thing must look like and work like this, right? Consider the system that it's going to live on to make the best choices and leverage what all of these wonderful people here provide that you can use. So let's talk about WordPress on LSU's campus, just as an example. This is a department site that's on WordPress. WordPress, right? Easy to use for content administrators. Why is it struggling? LSU is moving away from using any WordPress. Why? Let me show you a small thing. Look at the URL. It didn't have to be there, right? That's a choice somebody made in configuring the WordPress installation to give, I don't even know what that is, Site-01? That'll help with SEO, won't it? Simple things, right? These are things that were absent by choice. Somebody just decided, meh, the friendly URL patterns, vanity URLs meeting. I've got maybe a printed handout that I want to give out on campus to steer people to my website. Someone at lsu.edu slash myawesomething, right? Not a great ability to do that or do that in an easy way. Access to tools to help show that return and manage the site and make sure it's doing well and serving what it needs. Restricted. Can't get into our Google Analytics. Steven, no, right? Those are choices, right? And the challenges that can lead to a failure of a system on a campus is to take too many of these choices and controls, put them into the hands of a limited group that will always have that ready-made excuse to be too busy, right? Give those tools to the people that need them, let them work with them. So let's go through some examples of that, right? Giving control and options to the people that need to operate the system. Here is a screenshot. Again, we're not looking at the design. Background imagery was a big thing back, you know, I think we moved away from it, but that was a big thing when it was designed. Friendly URL, right? Seems simple, but, you know, the choice. But we went a little further than that, right, to kind of make things match. And this is, you know, just took a little of extra effort, but in our minds was worth it. You know, if you look at... Here's the menu system setup. So primary, secondary menu items match that URL path in terms of where you're at in the site. And so do the breadcrumbs, right? So just simple little things, you know, maybe not important to everybody, but, you know, making lots of small decisions like this along the way to make the system make sense and help with things like SEO, we believe, you know, in some of the structure decisions. Path Auto and Drupal is a great tool to do things like this, right? So taking a few minutes during the build phase to think through the patterns and putting something in place that's logical and is going to follow that structure, you know, so if you're not familiar with the Path Auto module in Drupal, it's one that's commonly used, right? But then put it in, but then think through how to configure for each content type. I'm going to publish this and what structure do I want to put it in, right? Make it friendly and have a good logical pattern that can scale and grow as the site grows. So another thing that we use for this platform, I talked about the multi-site on Drupal 6, we turned it into one site on Drupal 7 with an organic groups installation for the control and access on a per department basis. We've got, you know, 15-plus departments all running in here. So there's a content type for each department, which creates, you know, the node or the homepage for that department and then all of their content that they generate and the permissions for the editors within each department is controlled by that organic groups access. Then taking it a step further, I talked about those vanity URLs. So the concern was, well, we're on students.lsu.edu and now we need to promote My Awesome Event. Well, what if three different departments have My Awesome Event and they all want that vanity URL? Let them in to that control, right? And have that option to create those URLs. Get some feedback. You know, trampling on one another, having that duplication. Wait, you can't have My Awesome Event. My event's awesome, right? This is some contrib module. It's a sandbox, I think, still, but, you know, we went ahead and put it out there within organic groups. So I can only create that vanity URL within the group that I'm a member of, right? It's going to automatically put that part in the path and then I can put the rest in. So, you know, small thing, pretty handy, overcame that concern of there's a lot of us here. I don't want them messing up my stuff and what I use, right? And look, I was speaking of the organic groups and the department nodes. So here's an example of two department homepages. Again, these are department nodes. You see, they have a same general structure, but there is some variety within it. Design-wise, we can debate, but a couple of the controls that we gave to make the departments unique but still fit in a common platform. We've got dynamic backgrounds doing the different background imagery and that'll carry through the group and all of its content. Again, background is where the thing when this design was executed. And then within the content, you see the one on the left has a drop-down menu in the teaser area. The one on the right has more of a teaser again. It's just some variety and choices that the departments for their unique needs can have. The Center for Academic Success uses that drop-down menu. Instead of, I think it was like a seven or eight-click process to get to help in my subject that I'm struggling with, it's right there in the menu. I need help with biology. It's going to be the second choice right there and it sends into the page with all of the information that somebody needs help with biology could get to. So looking a little bit closer at the variety within these two templates and how we did it. So again, this is the Center for Academic Success page. Kind of going through the first part here. Control over the image. This is all just on the content type in the department node. These are just choices of how the fields are structured and what tools were used to create this page. The drop-down menu is just a set of links and then it builds into that. And then we've got, notice those are empty. So those are fields that they chose not to use instead of the drop-down menu. And so that's how this page got published with this configuration. Now if we switch over to the other one, right, same content type, same node, same set of fields and it's just choices of what was used. This is flat. I didn't want to do the live demo thing but if we pulled up the actual page, the images in the main area rotate through. We didn't do a carousel. I encourage you all to go to ShouldIUseAcarousel.com to know why we didn't do a carousel. But they still wanted some semblance of motion on the page, right? So we built rotating kind of background images for the teaser area for the departments that chose to use them. Again, back here, one image, that one just stays because they like Mike the Tiger right there, right? Studying on his MacBook. But Veteran and Military Services had a few more photos. Wanted to kind of give that imagery and that feel. So that's just upload a second image and it works and they could do many more. They use these fields. So that's how the teaser appears instead of the drop-down menu and left the drop-down menu fields empty so it doesn't appear. No code has to change for this. This is all just kind of taken care of and it's just, you know, you can do a variety for your department and this kind of carries through the page. There's more options on the bottom, you know, just through choice of images. The one site here used the icons in that second row of things to promote and made it more like a secondary navigation element, which wasn't what we intended when we were building this out but that's what they took and ran with it and works for them. Those were more thought of as teasers for news and information that could kind of update the page and have new things flowing through and that's how they chose to do those pieces there. And now I've messed up my flow, there we go. Looking at the footer of the site and again on these department nodes, so we're a little lower on the screen here for these two departments. This is all editable and controllable. So on the left you see the contact information, somebody's phone number changes or, you know, moved to a different thing, need a different email, it's just editable text. Again, it's another field on the node. Simple stuff but powerful because we're giving that control. Nobody has to go to a developer to change the footer code site wide, right? And then what I think is interesting is the social media links. Remember we got 15 departments, 15 Twitter feeds, some have Facebook, some don't like Facebook, Pinterest came about, they wanted to put that in there, others have no Pinterest and don't want one, right? So how do you deal with that, right? And do it in a graphical way. In the theme, there are these icons that are mapped to classes that the menu spits out. So this is a standard Drupal menu for these footer links and by naming the menu item Twitter, it's going to insert that class, call the class in the theme, I see Chris in the background, tell me if I'm getting this right, right? And that's what makes the menu appear. The menu item appear with the icon and then you can control as you see kind of in the bottom left like this is my Twitter feed linked to my Twitter page, not the main LSU one and another department can have another and then choose which ones you want to have. So if we decided Pinterest is no longer of interest, we're not going to have it anymore, unpublish that menu link, Pinterest goes away and the other department could go in their department menu and do a different set of them, right? As long as we know of the social media network and have the icon in the theme, everything else works. I think we've added a couple since it launched, so it's not a big ordeal to add them in either. Again, we've been talking about the department node content type in case you care to see here's the fields, right, that we were just talking about. This is the node configuration screen in the Drupal admin and the series of fields that are made available. Again, the choices that were made and then in the background, things decide where and how it's going to appear and handles the formatting nicely, right? So we've got an example here is the footer columns like I was just talking about. The example on this only chose to use one. This could actually go across and have if they wanted kind of a footer menu site navigation type thing. The footer columns field allows for that to allow up to four I think can fit down there, right? And that's all editable, manageable within these fields. This isn't the prettiest, remember? But this is kind of the background of the structure of that department page using panels and panelizer in particular. So department, home pages are nodes in organic groups and then they're panelized. So we looked at the top section in the fields. The bottom part of that page has left and right columns that are completely flexible through panelizer to choose what we want to put in here. And that's this first column and second column regions. Probably should have given you a screenshot of what those are. But choice, there's some defaults that come. There's a stack of news headlines and events published in there that automatically appear. But not every department has events. Not every department wants to publish news every day or every month even. And they will take those out and maybe drop in a YouTube video in the lower left. One place doesn't like the events format and doesn't want to publish events in there. They have a Google calendar, so they just embedded the Google calendar in the lower left region. Panelizer helps us do that to put these different content panes in mix and match and change the order per department. Rather than it being one template, one structure, you're always going to have your news stack here, right? So those were just some examples. But again, let's get into some of the lessons learned. Like what things might we do differently, what worked well through just lots of those decisions and choices in building this platform. Three things that I've got check marks here so they went well. But the story I want to tell here is a lot of this stuff kind of came along with things that Drupal does well. Again, the community view, all the people with the tools to help you do it well. We did not spend a ton of time necessarily focused on these three areas, but it's three things we've measured after the fact. And hey, those went pretty well without having to do it, right? The other choices we've made for things like that URL structure and other things led to some good results here without a whole lot of customization or focus. So for example, SEO results, right? Logical URLs, good menu structure, meta tags module, right? For good default meta tags, publishing in with the tokens from the content type. The students.lsu.edu site ranks highly for all these keywords that other departments on campus that aren't on Drupal are like, how the heck are you ranking above me? My department's not even on your platform. I can't get my site above yours, right? For some of these keywords, it's great, right? It's like, well, because we're on Drupal. You know, 917 keywords in the top 50 and this isn't a non-branded meaning keywords that don't start with LSU, for example. So, and y'all can check me on this, we pulled this report a few weeks ago. Maybe it's still there, but how to balance checking account? Not at LSU, just how to balance my checking account, right? Tools for students to help them succeed and tools like the students.lsu.edu site ranks in the, I think, the top 10 for that, right? Pretty cool. That's not something we optimized for, but, you know, worked out pretty well. Security. We survived Drupal getting, yay. If you're not familiar, Drupal get in. There was a critical security release. A lot of sites were impacted. I believe it was in, like, the fall of 2014, if I'm getting my days correct. Just read from you here the email exchange we had related to Drupal get in. I think it's a, it's one that I really enjoyed. So, I think that security release came out on October 15th. On October 29th, I got an email from the IT manager on campus. The guy that had to deal with the multi-site and those 15 deployments I talked about. Again, this is 14 days later. Please address this update as soon as possible. Drupal.org, PSA, blah, blah, blah, right? Oh no, let me check. Again, I'm not the guy that does the code. I was able to send him this reply. I will double-check, but I believe this PSA is a follow-up on the security updates that we had proactively made on the site when the issue was first identified. I said to my client, this was a security update I mentioned to you last week. The client was copied in the email from the IT manager. That was great to send. The reply I got, thanks. I knew you'd be on top of it, yay. Now, how did we do that, right? We'll get into some of the configuration management in a second, but it's through what I think was a successful use of Drupal features and helping us to release without fear of side effects, right? We've got a solid core platform using mostly contributed modules in standard ways. There's not a lot of hacks or things on those modules. So we don't get the unexpected results that you can see. Like, wait, why did this break? Oh, I pushed the release for that. And it's really good. One of the main ways we're able to do that, I'll show you in a slide about features coming up here in a minute. Accessibility. It's a big topic. Universities in particular at risk of lawsuits and things, right? It's a responsibility to make your site accessible to all. But it's not only a responsibility. I mean, it's an important thing to do, right? You wouldn't, like, only build a website for people that are right-handed and not serve the left-handed people, right? So why not make your site useful to all who need it? And that's kind of the goal. What we did, again, Drupal helps with a lot of this. We just made some small choices in the build phase that we knew would help towards this, but didn't have a whole cycle of the project to just focus on this. Small choices like, it's an image upload field. Let's make the alt text a required piece of that image upload module and field, right? So that to put an image up on the site, you have to supply me some alt text, right? So that screen readers can do something with that image as well. What we did, though, afterwards is we did an accessibility audit of the site. How did we do it? How's it doing, right? Found that we're in pretty good shape, thanks to mostly default things in Drupal for the, I don't know the pronunciation of the acronym, but the WCAG level AA guidelines, right? Which is what we tried to follow. Did find some things that we needed to fix up, right? Create a punch list and completed those. And what I'm particularly proud of, you know, it was far enough along, in the footer, site-wide, is a link that says accessibility and points people to, that's the screenshot on the top half of the page, a place with a form and other methods to contact because accessibility, like anything else, you're not just done with it, right? You're not done with SEO. It's a living site. There's content going into it every day. Any of it might, you know, not work for somebody in some way. So it requires coming back, having monitoring programs, but also allowing a reporting mechanism. Are you having a particular problem with a part of the site? Let us know. Then we'll fix it, right? It's not a boxy check. It's something you follow along the way and have to constantly keep on top of. So I'm glad we've got the accessibility statement in there. You can find accessibility statement generators online that, and that's what we use just to generate the statement that we were confident in saying, you know, about the site and what we think it meets. But it doesn't definitively say it's absolutely compliant with everything you might think of. It says, we think we've done it, but if you're having a problem, let us know, right? And that's the purpose of the accessibility statement. It kind of lets the user know the baseline that you're trying to follow, provides a link to that baseline, and provides a mechanism to report against it if you find a problem. I talked about problems that we've uncovered since the site's been in the wild for a while. That's pretty. Table code for layouts, if you look closely enough in there. I really don't look too closely.  If you have a WYSIWYG editor, right? That is an open invitation to create some fun. But, you know, what we found in here was, and this may be something you experience as well, a lot of, you know, marking and communications activity on campus is still in a print mindset, right? Thinking of things like it's a page layout. And using tables is that crutch in the code to arrange that wall of logos or whatever it may be, right? We've done the best we can to accommodate that once, but once you enable that table button or allow it in the code, you're going to get some. One thing we did was allow for classes that tables at least don't break the responsive design. If the table gets too wide, it's not going to blow out the template. It's going to insert scroll bars. Not ideal, but it doesn't break, right? So beware the table button in your WYSIWYG. If you enable it, you'll get things that look like this. This is an example of what I'll call a list page. So staff lists or other things. And we have a way to solve for these styled lists, right? With a style applied to the thumbnail, you know, with a nice circle and everything. It can be done, like I said. There's no custom code to create that, and I don't have to go into the WYSIWYG and make this a table, but there's a lot of steps in how we built it. So I can do it because I can call up, you know, some of the developers who are there in the back and ask, how did we configure that module and work my way through? But so to create this list, the user would have to create the basic page node, create people nodes, right? Create a node queue so that we could order and put the list of people in the thing. Then assign person nodes to the node queue, panelize the basic page, and put the node queue block view into the panelized basic page node. Sounds simple, right? Your student worker can be trained on this and... So it can be done, not the best, like I said. What I am excited about, and we've just installed it, we started using it, and it's pretty cool coming along. Some of the stuff Drew actually showed in his keynote of some of the media management and other kind of editor experience looks even better. So I look forward to some of that. That would solve a lot of these problems. But this is the paragraphs module. And number one, it didn't disrupt any of that other flow. It didn't break any of that, putting it in the site. And it just gives a friendlier set of steps to do that same task I just talked about. Because what it creates is bundles, and you can have many bundles, of fields. So it's almost like a content type, sort of. But then this bundle becomes a field in your content type. And then as the user's publishing into that field, they can choose which type of bundle they want. I want a list bundle, and it'll give me all the fields to make my list. Right there in those same node edit form, I don't have to go to panelizers and node queues and all that fun stuff. It's all in that place. Select, fill out, there's some of that. That's how the fields look in the node edit form to start to make that list. You can choose what fields go in there, choose what displays, things like that. I'm not an expert on paragraphs yet, so I'll stop there. There's a session tomorrow that I'm very much looking forward to about paragraphs in that module. So you can look for that on your schedule. But we're excited about this creating simpler steps for what's seemingly a simple thing, right? And give better control and options for a nice style list of things on a page. Seems easy, right, but don't use the tables and maybe don't go down the panelizer node queue gumbo of stuff. Drupal 8 images. Put an image in line in my text and align it left or right. Amazingly complex in Drupal 6 and 7. I mean, it can be done, but there's like this configuration of modules and things and extra screens and clicks or something you have to put in the theme file. This is a screenshot. Again, Louisiana Drupal User Group, we just played around at one of our meetups with Drupal 8. And I was amazed. This was like my first impression of Drupal 8 when we did this was like, wow, images just do that, right? You put in, there's an image button, I think in the WYSIWYG. It pops up this modal. You can upload the image and then you can tell it, align left, center, right. Provide a caption and the caption will display too. Simple stuff that could be done in Drupal 7, but it took a lot more effort to configure things in a friendly way. I don't think we ever got there. This seems much simpler. I'm looking forward to it. I talked about features earlier, right? With the deployment and configuration. So one of the things that happens with Drupal Features is overrides. So Drupal Features takes a set of configuration options that you've made and can export that and converts it into code, which is good because it's in your code repository. You can always recover from things. But what happens is if you put too much in there, if you cross the line and you get into content going into your features, then that gets edited in production because it's content, like what words are said in a menu. And that will lead to overrides. And that's where, again, the choice to keep content out of our features but keep the basic configuration in allowed us to deploy things like security updates with that confidence. And we're not trampling on overridden features and having those unexplainable side effects sometimes. Drupal 8, oops, I don't have my Drupal 8 screenshot. Drupal 8 has the configuration management options that instead of features, there's more and better ways to do that. Again, I'm not going to be the expert in how it works or give you the walkthrough on that. But we feel like it gets even better. And you have less of that risk of side effects and more control and options and tools with configuration management and Drupal 8 to, again, do security and other update releases without that fear of side effects. Because you can configure and review it in a staging environment and then push those same changes up, including some of the content changes, is my understanding. Again, I think there's several configuration management sessions going on at this conference and much smarter people than me can walk you through how that all works. But we feel like that's another Drupal 8 improvement that will help. And just in summary, like I said before, any system WordPress, all those can technically do the job. And we think Drupal does it well. But with any of these systems, they can't do everything. None of them can. But even if you have to go through multiple node queue steps like I was just showing, always just be focusing on what the site can do. There's always a way, right? You can get through it and try to find that way through contrib modules, configuration site building before you get into that custom code. And assuming that you have to customize something and focus on what it can. With that, I wanted to give everybody a reminder. Please join in for some sprints. At the end of the week here on Friday, community sprints, you don't have to be a developer to participate in sprints. There's plenty of things to do. Folks can always use help testing some of these tools and, you know, reporting bugs, you know, helping organize the issue queue. So community sprints are for everyone. Please join. And thank you. Please also evaluate the session. Sorry for the audio challenges here. But I do have just a couple minutes if anybody has any questions. Also, I'll stick around. Glad to give anybody a walk through, you know, of any specific part of the site that you're curious about or want to see just come find me afterwards or down at the Media Current booth, number 315. Any questions? Yes. So if it's that really messy workflow, she knows how to do it and could do it for her departments, but she'll call and ask for help. But standard content, it's them all day long. We're not publishing content for 15 departments. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, good question. So, look, yeah, well, the question's about the user levels and permissions, you know, and how is that managed? Is there a hierarchy to it? And how do they control that? So it starts with organic groups. That was one of the big reasons for organic groups. To let people into the things they can be and what they aren't. Organic groups does make your permissioning a lot more complex in terms of administration of it, because you've added a whole other layer of permissions. There's the Drupal users and roles and permissions tied to that. And at the Drupal roles and permissions level, we have administrator and I don't remember the exact words, but there's levels like department site editor, department site manager, and those control general permissions, like I can or can't publish a news item, regardless of what group I'm in. I do have access to publish that type of node or I don't. Then the organic groups permission comes in with things like, I have permission to edit my department's menu. I can select to publish a node that I have permission to publish the node in general on the site, but I have permission to put that node in my group. That is one of the challenges we run into though, is somebody trying to do something and they can't quite get to it and it's usually like a nested permissions problem. In terms of administration of it, we did have the benefit. All of these departments roll up under one division and the client that I get to meet with who's excellent, she manages that and fields their request initially. If she needs help letting somebody do something, she'll call us and we'll help unlock the mystery of the levels of permissions. Yes. So you mentioned introducing more logical URLs, the department and SEO as a result. Roughly, how much content would move across all of these departments? We had a luxury when it came to content. Sorry, sorry. So the question was about the URLs and how much content was moved into these URLs as the Drupal 7 site launched. So we had a luxury with the migration part of this and that was, LSU was honest with itself and it looked at those sites that I showed the screenshot and said, content in here isn't very good anyway. It's not worth the trouble to migrate it. So we set up the structure and gave all the fields permission, so built a new site from the ground up with this hierarchical organization and then because it was within organic groups, site launches were publishing that department node and making it available to the public and the content underneath it. So it was a rolling launch, a few departments launched and then other ones got their content but it was, they went through a content rewrite as part of the update. That's not always the case and then you get into things like the migrate module or other methods to bring content across from another platform or system but that was a great luxury we had that we weren't bringing some of the old and not as effective messaging into the new. So as far as that decision, was it designed as the old URLs not even worth redirecting? We did account for a lot of the redirects from the main stuff and the hierarchy of the URLs was different. But yeah, the deeper pages within the site, we didn't go too far. But what you can do and the question, sorry I keep forgetting to repeat, the question was over the old URLs of the content that got rewritten, did we redirect at all? And no, we didn't redirect at all but what you can do is monitor for the top four or four errors and see popular things that people are still trying to get to. So we went through a few phases of kind of reviewing that list, hitting the priority items but not spending in an ordered amount of time on the page that's six levels deep that nobody ever saw anyway. That's not always the case though, right? Like sometimes there's a very good case we need to have the continuity and keep things across but I'm realizing we had some luxuries with this build and project. Other questions? Yeah, good question. So translation and localization for the structure and any challenges there. I would guess that the organic groups being in the mix would make it interesting to be honest. I would think that actually I'm pretty confident that a build in Drupal 8 that's going to try to do some of these things and have translation is going to be a little friendlier is kind of a general answer. I'm trying to think if we've done translations on an organic group site and I don't think we have. So that would be the biggest unknown for me is how that would play into the mix and that would be something during a discovery phase to really think about and probably do some vanilla site install testing against like okay if we make these architecture choices and we're going to put translation on top of this, that and the other are things going to play nice together. I'm trying to think I don't know if we have you saw we have panels and panelizer. I don't think we have fieldable panel pains which is a Drupal module in the mix with the panels but I know that can make translations a challenge as well. So what it's really about is if you know you're going into a project and you need or may need some day to offer translations to keep that in mind when you're making the initial decisions of what modules are we going to use and are they going to play nice with translations in particular or any other kind of thing that's not in core but is a big structural thing for the site. I'm looking at Tony in the back and she's going through, it's not a university site but she's going through some of what I just talked about right now with her fieldable panel pains and honestly that's in architecture decision for her site when we were setting some things up we didn't realize at the time we chose a couple of modules that they were going to conflict with how translations were going to want to interact with them as well. Now we're having to kind of address that. Yeah, yeah, it's if you know you're going to be dealing with multiple languages for your site that's one of probably the main things to kind of know up front because there's choices you can make in the very early configuration either in the back end or the front end right you know for the users or the publishers you know how these things are going to work and work together definitely. Yeah, we're fortunate that the main client helps manage a lot of that so what is unique to her is she comes from a marketing background outside of universities and so doesn't always think of things in kind of the university way and tries to apply some of the knowledge there so she's done things like implement a monthly marketing meeting with all the marketing people from all the divisions to kind of pull them together and talk about things like that and kind of show examples and we've gone and presented here's how Google Analytics work for your site and you know configured some reports based on that that they all can use so I think the answer of you know the collaboration across departments a lot happens with you know coordination on the client side because you know they have her kind of in the the central role and is trying to promote those sorts of things. Yeah, but I mean we see that a lot where you know sometimes we're the ones introducing departments to one another and trying to make those recommendations of you know why things are the way they are right. Yeah, sure, yeah that's an interesting one so the question is user management and how to deal with the volume of users and different departments and who gets what permission so there's a single sign-on with the campus accounts that first establishes a login for anybody in the site and it uses the CAS module CAS to interact with so we didn't build the single sign-on that's a campus thing right but the Drupal CAS module just plugged right into it and worked beautifully so first step is they log in with their LSU account right so they don't it's not like a separate like we created a Drupal user for you so once they're in there then it's knowing that that person needs access to this group this department in this role right controlled through the the division head knowing the people and who needs to be able to do what and she'll assign the groups and the roles I think I'm running out of time yeah I'll stand right out here if anybody else wants to talk through more


Hello there. Can you all hear me? Am I speaking clearly in the microphones on? Great, hi. Kia ora everybody, my name is Lucy Orbell and I have been part of the team who have been beavering away behind the scenes to put together NDF this year. And I also work at Digital New Zealand and I'm introducing this lovely peer who are about to kick off this next series of sessions. And from a Digital New Zealand perspective, I can say that this session about UX user experience is really interesting from my professional perspective. And I think Kate Wonlis here is from Te Papa and Dan Dixon is the Strategy Director at the Digital Arts Network. And they both have a very people-centric—this is my sense from reading your bios— both have a very people-centric approach to user experience and I for one am really delighted to be listening to your session. So please take it away. I think there are some handouts coming to you guys, but they're also going to be available to you online as well. Thank you. Hi everyone, hope you're having a great day. You just had a lovely lunch. It's a little bit unfortunate. This is always kind of like the graveyard slot at the conference so it can often be a bit downbeat or people can be a bit low on energy, but we've got like a tag team talk here, which hopefully will kind of liven things up a bit. So this talk is really, as Lucy was saying, about how you can get easy and simple and straightforward feedback on your ideas. And what we're here to do is give you some tools and techniques and a little bit of a process that you can take home. And as part of that, we've got a handout that's circulating around and that's so you don't have to take detailed notes off all the slides so that lots of the really key ideas are in that handout. But if you want to take notes and add a few bits and pieces to that, then you can just draw away on that. We've also got the link at the end as well if you want to take that away. But who are we? So I'm Dan Dixon. I'm the strategy director at Digital Arts Network. And really my job kind of revolves a lot around trying to get human-centered design into projects and often into kind of slightly abnormal projects or different projects. So we try and apply humans into design in all sorts of different ways. So I've worked in agencies. I've worked in big companies such as the BBC in the UK. And I also worked in academia for about seven years where I taught and researched on interaction design. And I have a kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. I kind of have a long-term view on design research because I spent seven years doing a really kind of deep, detailed ethnographic piece of design research myself when I was doing a PhD. And Kate on the other hand manages to do things really short. So Kate and I worked together at the museum. Kate and I worked together on some projects for Auckland Museum about a year ago, which is where some of these ideas came from originally. So I'm Kate. I work here at Te Papa. I actually originally started off studying graphic design, but I realised quite quickly that people are way more interesting than pixels. And so moved into more of a research and user experience area. I worked at a startup, which is very exciting. I worked at Digital Arts Network with Dan. And now I'm working here doing a lot of prototype testing in the museum with visitors really fast. We've got heaps of projects going on. They're all quite fast-paced. We can't really afford to spend too much time on research. My personal best for fastest turnaround for research is four hours. So I'm hoping to beat that sometime soon. Bear with us. There we go. We're working. So I wanted to imagine that you are working on a project. Imagine that everyone has lots of amazing ideas. It's all very exciting. But then, when the things built, the people who it's made for, they don't get it, they don't understand it, and they don't like it. We've all been on projects like that. I've been on projects like that. But enter, pop-up UX. This changes everything. We're on a mission to help everybody, designer or not, do their own design testing. But why pop-up? Why pop-up store? This appears where it's needed, but can be put away later. It's not always on. This talk will give you the tools to do research before getting an external agency company or even another department involved. OK. So what is UX? So the UX might be a term that's not entirely familiar to everybody. And there's lots of different definitions around for what UX is. UX is a discipline that is really, really broad. So techniques can be used in all sorts of different ways. In the narrowest sense, we could be thinking about UX as really just being about digital experiences, which many of us are probably working on. But more expansively in the way that we try and often apply UX principles, it involves human-centred design across a bunch of different experiences, all sorts of different products. But here, I suppose what we're doing is treating this as to mean that it's really the design of people's interactions, really, with a product or a service. And so what is design research? And we've kind of mentioned design research a few times. And we've talked about bringing design research to you guys, to the people. And what we're trying to do here is not cover all of UX and all of UX as a discipline or a practice. We're just trying to cover a straightforward way to get out there and do a bit of design research. So design research, the intention of design research is to give you a good picture of how your design or how your products might actually behave in the real world before you actually get to the point of actually building something. And really simply, we've got this formula for design research, which is prototype plus context plus people. It's building a thing, creating a thing, taking it out into the context that it will be used in and actually getting the type of people who will be using it to use it. And this is not quite usability testing, which some of you might be familiar with. Usability testing is figuring out kind of the details of things once quite a lot of design has been done. What we're talking about here is trying to figure out what the right thing is to build in the first place, not later on as you're building it, trying to figure out how to build the thing right. But why would we even do design research? We often build things based on our assumptions about what people will understand or what they'll like, only to find out when it's too late that those assumptions were wrong. So it's much better that we learn this earlier in the process before significant time and money has been spent investing in something that's just not engaging. Particularly in museums, we work on experiences that are incredibly dependent on context. If a visitor is tired after spending two hours walking around the museum, that's going to affect how they interact with our products. And it's impossible for us to design for this in our back offices. We have to get our design ideas out into the world. So I'll give you an example of this. We developed this component that translates Māori words in our interactives that are out on the floor. In an early version, we had an underline for the word instead of the bubble. We took this out onto the floor, we showed it to a few people, and multiple people told us that the underline looked like a spelling mistake. So I'm really glad that we called that one early before we rolled it out to all of our interactives. So all of this testing, research, it sounds really hard and expensive. But I will let you in on a secret. It's actually really easy. You can do it and your team can do it, whether you're a curator, a producer, a developer, a project manager, whoever. If you want to test an idea, you don't have to spend thousands on user research. You can do it yourself. It's really shocking. I know this is all of the user research is just appalled that I'm sharing this with you. So one of the things we're going to do is not try and cover everything. What we've done is we've broken this down into three simple steps. Three things that you need to know to be able to go out there and pop up UX, do straightforward design research yourself. The first one is planning, and the second one is doing prototyping, and the third one is doing intercept interviews, so take it out and showing your prototyped people. And here's how we're going to help you by giving you some tips and tools to get through those three steps. So the first one is how to plan by answering just four, I said five, but four simple questions. The second one is prototyping with paper, so you don't need to actually bring in any clever technology. You don't need to necessarily bring in developers. You don't need to bring in people who actually build this stuff as just prototype with things you have to hand. And the third one is actually then how to go out there and actually talk to people. So first off, planning. So planning, we all like to do planning, don't we? Planning sounds really boring, right? But the reason we do planning is that we avoid epic fails, which is too easy if we don't do any planning. And we've got a really simple and straightforward way to help you do the planning. There's just four simple questions that you need to answer as you go through doing this. So question one is what questions are you actually trying to answer when you go out and do the research? And kind of the idea is to keep this very kind of tight and very limited. So just try and find out one, two, maybe three things and not try and find out everything about what you're looking for. And this is the really important one and the one that you kind of start with. The other three questions kind of flow on from this. But the idea with all these questions is you can kind of come back and refine them and refine them as you're going through and get the answers to this. And a good example of this is recently we're working with the Auckland Museum website. Auckland Museum to build a new website, do a refresh of that, do a digital refresh. And we were interested in the way that visitors in the galleries would actually be using the mobile website to find information. So we took a prototype of the new Auckland Museum mobile website into the galleries to try and figure out how people would be using it. And the things that we're kind of really interested in were not to try and test the usability of that but really just to see if people could find information. So we were testing the information architecture, whether people could find a route through to the information they needed to get to. We were testing some labelling in there, so we kind of worried that whether the names on the pages and the terms and the navigation made sense. And to see whether the navigation system that we're designed for mobile would actually work and people would get it so that we're using a burger menu style interaction there and see whether people understood that. So simple questions. Question two is what do you need to prototype to answer that? So you don't have to prototype everything in detail, just the flows that will answer your question. So really to focus in on a few pages that you need to get out in front of your users to actually test the ideas and test the concepts. So when we did the prototype of the museum, we marked up a home page and seven other pages and the menu that would allow people to get there so there's not a huge amount of content, not a huge amount of investment or effort that kind of went into that. And the key point here to this is don't try and prototype too many things at once. Again, go back to answering one simple question, figuring out what that simple question is, working on what the prototype is that you need to answer that. Question three is who is your audience and where will you actually find them? So, and this is kind of important for museums, galleries and archives and things is that the audiences are in different spaces. Sometimes they're actually close to you, sometimes they're not. So when we were doing the museum example, we were looking at trying to see how people found their way to... to information. So families and groups, we need to go somewhere that we can find families and groups so there's a discovery centre upstairs where there are always going to be lots of families. For foreign tourists on the other hand, they don't end up in that space so they tend to congregate down in the Pacifico Māori Galleries downstairs so you go there to find them. So the museum is the perfect place to do this kind of testing. Our audience is right out the door. Although not always. I learnt this the hard way when I tried to test collections online in the museum and I talked to a lot of foreign visitors but very few users of collections online and I just didn't get good data. So yeah, go where your users are.  So the idea here is to not try to record everything but the idea is to make all of these intercept sessions and when you're doing the research really lightweight. So for family, when we're testing the Auckland Museum mobile prototype we were just interested in a few specific questions for each of those specific audience groups so for families we're thinking about what content are they looking for and can they find their way to the what's on page and do they understand what the what's on page is for. And for foreign visitors it's things like did they find specific Māori content and was that what they were looking for and could they find that easily enough? One of the important things about this is that you can actually change you can, if you're coming up with some simple questions you want to answer you can change those questions as you're going through your research you don't have to fix them in place and then blindly follow through as you go through the research. It might be after a couple of intercepts, a couple of interviews that you think that you need to actually be looking for something different or something slightly different and usually you kind of start zeroing in on the things you're actually trying to answer and look for as you kind of go further and further through those intercepts. So again just four simple questions and we're going to hand out and all those four questions are on that handout but the first one is what questions are you trying to answer and understand that first and then what prototype do you need to answer those questions so in trying to keep the prototype as small and limited as possible. Number three is who is your audience? Where will you find them? So is it in the museum or do you have to go outside or find another way to get in front of people? And number four is what do you actually need to record? So what kind of things are you actually kind of jotting down? What kind of notes are you taking? What answers are you kind of making notes on when you're actually going out there and doing intercepts? Cool, next step, stage two. So we got that out of the way. Sorry, Dan, but now we're on to the much more interesting bit. Which is DIY prototyping. So when we're prototyping, a little bit of prototyping is really valuable. All you need is just humble, sharpies and paper. You don't need to be able to draw. In fact, if you're bad at drawing, that's actually good. And you don't need expensive design software. The first part is to work out all of the steps in your visitor journey and then decide on exactly what it is you need to prototype in order to answer your questions. You don't have to prototype the whole journey and all of the little parts. So when we were working on the Rongwhakata exhibition, we had a concept for an interactive about the influence of Christian religion on Rongwhakata. In this concept, different symbols would combine together and create a story. So our key question was, was this going to make sense to people? And so we just prototyped a little bit. If we'd prototyped the whole thing, it would have been huge. There we go. And this is what we made. Three screens, low five. Wow. It's good that it's on paper. It's good that it's a little bit shonky. This means that people won't get caught up in the design details. They'll tell you about the concepts.  So we took this, as it is, into the museum, talked to some visitors, and what we found is that people didn't get the concept. This was excellent to find out early in the process because we hadn't invested much time producing this prototype, and we could do something different. The one problem with paper is that people sometimes interact with it a little bit like a book, so they'll turn the page to get more content. If you don't want that, an alternative is putting your sketches onto a device. Come up. There we go. There are programmes like Pop or Envision that can let you do interactive prototypes with just sketches, and this makes it feel more real because people actually have to tap on things. So in the museum, you may also need to prototype physical experiences. And in this case, paper and toilet rolls can also do the trick. I hope you paid attention in the garden. There's a bit more making involved, but this is still cheaper and easier than manufacturing objects. All in all, paper is much more insightful than you might think. Paper can tell you whether an idea is good or not. Cool. Next part. So that was the fun, makey part of things, which is, for many of us, really the most enjoyable part. So now the part three is, how do you actually go out and talk to people? And sometimes it can feel like going out and talking to strangers wherever they might be. It's a little bit scary, a little bit intimidating, but it's not quite as scary or as intimidating as you might think. So we've got a really simple process here and a few tips and tricks that will help make that process easier going out and confronting strangers out in a museum or on the street that you might feel like you need to do your intercept. So the first thing to remember and actually probably the most important principle about all of this is actually talk as little as possible. And this is something that often new researchers kind of trip up on. But what you want to do is you want to hear what visitors have to say or that your audiences have to say. So you don't actually want to have to say very much at all.  So try playing that little game, trying to consciously not talk. And then you kind of know if you won the game by the fact that you ask a really simple question like what did you think about that? And then your visitor kind of goes off on this huge spiel, this kind of long monologue on all of that. And so you've not actually talked very much. So that's a win. Cool. So we've got a cheat sheet here, like a simple process to go about doing intercepts. This is on the handout we've got here as well. So really all you need to do is walk up to someone. You smile and say hi. Smiling is kind of something that can be easy to forget if you're a little bit nervous. You introduce yourself, you introduce the organisation you're from and why you're doing this and what's going on. And then importantly you tell them how long it's going to take part. And usually these things take five to ten minutes, maybe probably about ten minutes. Usually an intercept when you're starting them will take longer than you expect it to take. You think it'll take five minutes, it'll probably take ten. Then you ask them to take part when you've told them all of that so that they're aware of everything. So there's some consent there. Then what you do is you show them the prototype and as Kate was showing you, we're talking about three to two, three, four pages of something that you're showing them. And you ask them questions as you're going through that. So you're constantly asking them what they're thinking and what's going on. And you observe closely what's happening and you don't want to just pay attention to what they're saying, you want to see what they're doing. People will sometimes report that things are easier than it appears that they're doing it. They look like they're having a much harder time. Then when it's done you ask them if they've got any questions because quite often people have questions for you about what you're doing and why. And then you thank them for their time and move on. Normally when we do intercepts we do intercepts in pairs. That's the way. You can take turns as well which is really another great thing about being in pairs so one of you can be approaching somebody and is that two minutes left or is that okay? Yeah. And I think you expect about three or four per hour and always plan a break afterwards. Sorry. So the key to getting people to talk more than you is asking really good questions and you only really need to remember five. These are the questions that I use all the time when I'm testing. So the first thing that you could ask somebody when you hand them the prototype is what do you think this is? And that will tell you how your design is communicating for itself. The next thing that you could ask is what do you think you can do here? And that will tell you what people think is interactive. The next question you could ask is what would you do next? And that will tell you what people find interesting and what they want to engage with. If they ask you a question you can reflect that back on them. So if they ask what does this button do you'd say, well what do you think the button does? It gets a little bit infuriating after a while but it's worth it. Also if they don't talk and you've got to wait for about eight seconds as much as you want to break the silence you can prompt them with what are you thinking? And that's going to tell you what kind of decision they're trying to make or if they're reading something or if they're interested in something. So all of these questions are open-ended questions that is questions that require more than a yes or no answer. So a closed question might be are you enjoying Te Papa? That's just going to give you a yes or no answer. While an open question could be tell me more about your visit to Te Papa so far. This allows the visitor's perspective to come through and it's not a very natural way of having a conversation. You have to really concentrate but it is worth it Do you want to do this? Cool. So we're going to prove to you how easy this is. I'm going to run through what I would say if I was doing an intercept in the museum. So I would walk up to Dan and say hey, I'm Kate. I work here. We're working on a new design for this exhibition. I'm wondering if you've got five minutes if you'd like to take a look and give us some feedback. No, sorry, I don't have time. I've got to get back to my cruise ship now. That's a really common thing that we get. I'd say no worries, have a nice day. And that is the worst that can happen. That's all you've got to worry about. It really wasn't that bad. So we'll try that again. Hey, I'm Kate. I work here. We've got some designs for something we're working on for this exhibition. I'm wondering if you have five minutes and you'd like to take a look and give us some feedback. Awesome, so now we're in business. And so this is the prototype that we are working on. What do you think it is? I don't know. It's kind of said something about Christian faith. I'm not quite sure. What do the symbols mean? What do you think they mean? Oh, they look kind of religious to me. Yeah, it's something about religion. And what do you think you can do here? Maybe tap on the symbols? I don't know. Yeah, that's... What do you think you'd do next? Oh, I might tap on things randomly until something happened. Again, that's quite common. So that's just the start of an intercept we would keep going with more screens. But very quickly we're learning that this interface doesn't make sense to people and that it's not really clear what to tap on. So, remember, talking to people, it's not scary. But what next? This is not all. You want to look for the themes in your data. So look for the things that have come up multiple times and take notice of that. We could spend a really long time talking about this, but we're going to skip right over it in the interest of time. So, yeah, just to sum up, to recap, easy design research. That's what pop-up UX is. So there's three clear, simple steps. One, do planning so you figure out what to learn when you go out there. Second is to do some prototyping, so build the thing that you want to kind of find out about and make it physical, and do only the thing that you need to do. Number three is do intercepts. So go out and talk to people and show them the things that you're building and show them your ideas. And the important thing in there is do as little talking as possible. So if you're still not sure about design testing, listen to one of our digital producers. It's a sort of reality check. You can have a fabulous idea, but until it's in the hands of the people it's made for, it's nothing more than that. Prototype testing is like a great collaborator. It shows you where to go next and encourages you to carry on. So, what will you test? That's us.


Before I begin, I'd like to state that our organization is non-partisan, but I'm aware of my audience right now So I'm going to be hearing it towards you Centuries ago some people that have long since died have decided on our voting method. We call this chronology and despite advances in mathematics and political science, we've been obedient to this method virtually entirely without questioning it and It's become so pervasive that when we think about what it means to be voting We tend to confuse voting itself with plurality voting are both for one method and so That's sort of the degree that we're talking about So what I want you to start thinking about is should we be questioning our obedience to this Vote for one priority voting method and should we be concerned with alternative methods? so To begin I want you to Understand what I mean when I say a voting method When I say that I mean when voters give an expression of their opinion on a state of candidates And that information is translated to select the winner or winners and right now I'm going to be focusing on voting methods that select only one winner and What does it mean to be a good voting method a good voting method is one that gives an accurate reflection of support For all those candidates and selects the candidate that best represents the electorate Now It's sort of the beginning here with the expression with voting Now with priority voting. We're told to select one candidate That's it and if you're brazen enough to choose more than one candidate, then they fill your ballot away So I want you to think for a minute Is there any way to offer? less information than choosing one candidate Really think about this. Can you give any less information than that? I thought about this for years and I haven't been able to come up with anything So I find it bizarre that When we offer so little information and we put our ballot in the ballot box We expect something magical to happen We expect our voting method to spit out our result that represents us and yet we're dismayed when it doesn't happen The mere fact that we go through the motions of democracy is not good enough That's that's a fantasy So I want you to Think about what if we did other things the same way that we did voting the same way that we approached voting with priority or vote for one method so imagine the scenario where You have a loved one that's missing and so you go down to the police station to follow your missing persons report and they lead you down the hall and They introduce you to a sketch artist and the sketch artist you greet them and they say I want you to tell me the best feature about your loved one and In this in this case we'll say it's we'll say it's your wife and you say my wife. She has this beautiful mouth she has these deep red lips and When she's laughing she bites her tongue in this way. It's amazing And you start to go on but before you get far the The the sketch artist he stopped you he put he puts his hand out. It says That'd be enough Now given the information that you provided How good of a sketch do you think this person is going to come up with? You have a pair of floating lips He's going to be sending a search party out for the Rolling Stones logo He's not going to find your wife and Because our we do this same approach when we do we offer so little information and we expect this amazing result to come out and And we get surprised when it doesn't happen But we don't have to do it this way. There are alternative methods We have methods that allow you to Approve of all the candidates that you like you can rank candidates. You can score candidates So imagine going back to the scenario Where you followed your missing person before and you get out to the sketch artist and we'll have this sketch artist and Body these alternative methods and we'll say that the police department has Inspired that previous sketch artist So the sketch artist would ask okay Well, tell me all the features about your wife that you find pleasant Well, you can start with her mouth But you can go on you can talk about how her dark hair goes past her shoulders her cheekbones her eyelashes and The sketch artist might ask you to rank the features And so you talk about how you love her mouth the most how she has these really sparkling eyes And you like them a second you get the sketch artist could ask you to Score all the features about your wife and here you can get really in depth Your wife may not like you doing this by the way But what you come up with is a detailed assessment of what she looks like you're gonna get a picture of What resembles to be your wife and the search party is going to have a much better Chance finding for this way and looking for that Rolling Stones logo and When we offer expression this way with alternative voting methods I'm surprisingly we get better results and that's a large portion because we offer information Much more information than we do under priority Now there are other ways that priority Distorts our electoral process other than choosing for outcomes Priority is also responsible for having people marginalized and exclude candidates So I want you to go back to a familiar election and 2000. This is when Nader ran and Nader he He wasn't in the debates and that's not Unlike many other many other elections now with with Nader he Didn't have a lot of support, but some people They did support him and among those people was Michael Moore so in 2000 Ralph Nader he sold out Madison Square Garden and he's with 2000 seats That's that's pretty impressive and Michael Moore was there sort of cheering on Nader but So as he was cheering on Nader That that support continued But then Florida happened and in Florida we saw the vote splitting column and so after that They the support for Nader Gwindled and especially dwindled in 2004 when he ran again Because then what happened was that Michael Moore he completely changed his tune and this is someone that is Very aligned with the ideals that the Nader supports. So this should be really surprising for us. I mean from 2002 2004 Michael Moore didn't do a 180 as far as what his ideology was. He didn't change his opinion about taxes He didn't change his opinion about healthcare. He didn't change his opinion about Foreign policy and I'm not here to Detect Michael Moore and a negative light We shouldn't blame him. What we should be blaming here is Pornality voting now Imagine if we could take Michael Moore back in time to 2004 but Have him use approval voting Well, what would have happened then what would his tune have done? Well in 2004 if he was using approval voting well He he likely would have said you should vote for Kerry to avoid Bush winning but if we're using approval voting you can keep going you can choose as many candidates as you want with approval voting so Presumably he actually liked later in 2004. He just didn't want Bush to win So he would have said go ahead and vote for Nader and he would have done it just as enthusiastically as he had done in 2000 now The fact that we We have a voting method that has someone that is completely aligned with the candidate and yet Have them campaign against that candidate. I can't imagine the situation Now with with approval voting if this were to be used now We use Polling a lot to take support for candidates and that's often the way that Debates if the big debate was used to decide who gets in who doesn't so if we're using approval voting Then they're going to get a much more accurate reflection of support And so not just Nader, but all these other voices are going to be able to come into play you can't Exclude or marginalize people that are getting 20-30-40% in polls which they can do under approval voting and what that means is you get much more competition You get much more many more ideas in place Competition is what democracy thrives on and so you can imagine that Alternative voting is really that the miracle grow for democracy For how do you go to be I don't know what probably maybe maybe round up And within the last year I moved from Michigan to DC and Michigan it was a lot like a lot of other places and that They they don't do a very good job at electing independence and third parties. In fact, I looked it up the last person to be elected governor in Michigan was James Gordon James Gordon was elected back in 1841 and and it really shouldn't even count because James Gordon was from the Whig party and Unsurprisingly, we've been using Partality voting this whole time Something else interesting is that 1841 That's also about the time that the telegraph was invented. So that's that's the context That's the extent that we're out of date on this voting method So when I say probably voting is an out-of-date voting method This is the degree that I'm talking about if you saw someone They were using a telegraph machine. You would say hey, we have smartphones now And yet we don't think twice when we walk into the voting booth and we're using this antiquated priority voting method if we saw someone and They were walking down the street with the Walkman. We would say we have iPads and MPP players now And yet we don't think twice when we use priority voting And if we were at a friend's house and they said I need to check my messages And they go to their answering machine with the cassette tape and they go through their messages you would tell them We have voicemail now. You don't have to use that and yet We don't think twice when we use priority voting now We don't have to do this. I mean we have other choices here And like I mentioned with approval voting, they don't have to be difficult approval voting You're just choosing as many candidates as you want. No, so it's wins. The only rule you're changing is that your God doesn't get it So they choose other people. This is this isn't complicated so we don't use Photography, we don't use Walkman and we don't use answering machines that run on cassette tapes and We shouldn't be using an out-of-date priority voting method. It's out of date. We need to move on Now Not everyone I'm sure thinks that we need to move on with something besides I'm sure that there are people that love the fact that you can't express yourselves when you vote I'm sure that there are people that love the fact that certain candidates and ideas are Marginalized and excluded and I'm sure that there are people that love the fact that We're using a century's old And it's no accident that our last president of the United States to be an independent with George Washington Now If you don't like those features about priority voting Then you're going to start to need to care about alternative voting methods a lot This needs to be your issue because without alternative voting methods You're not going anywhere and I also have a Video as well on So just to give you an example Just how simple


In high-population density areas, noise pollution due to human activities is everywhere. Tranquility becomes a luxury to the few while it seems to be forever lost to the unfortunate many. The reason that many people cannot escape from noise pollution is simple. Noise is a sound wave that can go through conventional thin walls very easily. Much thicker walls are needed in order to block the noise, but most people, as you know, cannot afford such thick walls in their homes. Now, we at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have invented a noise shield panel, although light and thin, can stop the vibration of thin walls to block noise like thick walls. It can stand alone or as flexible as a curtain. What's made of the panels is remarkably simple. It consists of a frame and a membrane and some platelets. Assembled, we have a membrane fixed on the frame and decorated by some platelets. Now, the platelets vibrating on the membrane acting as a so-called local resonators, which are the basic units of our platform technology. When the noise excites the local resonators, its energy is greatly dissipated. Now, no exotic materials are needed. All we need is just conventional materials. For example, plastic wraps or aluminum foil that we use in the ordinary kitchen or rubber sheet that are used for surgical gloves that can be the membrane. The frame can be just hard plastic or any metal, and the platelets just be anything rigid. Now, active kids upstairs, loud music from next doors. Noisy neighbors are really annoying. Now, with our noise shield panels, now you can live in peace and quiet. Construction sites are major sources of noise, as you know. In such situations, conventional noise barriers are rarely used because they are too thick and heavy, so it's not very practical. It seems that there's nothing we can do in most cases, not anymore. We have proposed some solutions. For air compressors and diesel power generators, because our panels are very light and thin, they can be assembled easily as the noise enclosures to cover the noise source. When it's done, it can be disassembled and stored away. For hammering piling machines, we propose to use our flexible noise shields, which can be rolled down like curtains to shield the hammer and then roll up again and move to elsewhere when one pole is done. Now, conventional noise barriers along highways block the flow of air, so also the emission of cars and trucks. Now, our barriers are as effective as the conventional ones, but allowing plenty of airflow. Now, ground vibrations due to heavy trucks and trains and even earthquakes can also be shielded from targeted buildings. If you extend the ideas further, an entire city could be protected by a belt of our local resonators.  In this case, we propose our underwater noise shields, which can be rolled down like this and it can offer much better solutions than the existing ones, which are usually heavy and bulky and hard to use. Now, wherever you have noise problems in all these areas, there are opportunities for our technology platform. With a wide range of choices of materials, our panels can shoot extreme conditions, for example, high temperature, low temperature, high velocity, or even in outer space. The so-called locally resonant elastic matter materials is a technology platform fully owned by HKUST. Everything we talked about, we invented here at HKUST. With that knowledge, we can bring back tranquility to hundreds of millions of people. Thank you.