uPortal developers, This email:
1. Tells you how wonderful Google Ventures style Design Sprints are so you can be inspired to try them in your projects! 2. Updates on revised MyUW redesign vision per our latest design thinking. You might care because this impacts what MyUW might be working on and offering to uPortal, and because you might see something here inspiring to you or that you'd like to collaborate upon. ----- The MyUW team took the entirety of last week to work through a Design Sprint ala the Google Ventures instructions. http://www.gv.com/lib/the-product-design-sprint-a-five-day-recipe-for-startups This was: * Great fun * Deeply satisfying * A good way to (re-) seed the Scrum Epics and Stories that make up our redesign launch deliverables. I admit I went into the week with some misgivings about Oh No We're Re-Inventing Waterfall and Aren't We Supposed to be Agile and Doing Scrum WTF. I was completely wrong. An experienced UW-Madison designer (Phyllis Treige) worked very hard to coach the team through the Design Sprint and with her help and working through that Google Venture Design Sprint blog post's instructions, well, I thought it worked great. You might want to do Design Sprints for your portal implementations as well! (If you do, you'll be radically more successful if you involve an experienced designer, I suspect.) ---- This Design Sprint (and its accompanying user testing) has revised our vision somewhat for what the MyUW redesign looks like. In particular, the direction I think this is now going is: * Portlets will not be called "Apps". While well-intentioned, that idea turns out to fail in entertaining ways upon user testing. They'll be called something else where unavoidable and preferably just not called anything. * Collections of Favorites are gone, at least for now. [1] * User-selected Normal Window State portlets living on the landing tab are back in. This means that Maximized isn't the only way to get at user-selected stuff; portlets are sometimes in Normal Window State rather than only Maximized. * Favoriting a portlet and adding it to one's Welcome page (the only page of multiple portlets) is exactly the same thing. So, you favorite a portlet, and that adds it in Minimized window state right on your home screen. You might then expand it to Normal window state, and that expansion will be remembered. * Minimized window state will have a styled infocard-like representation. Title, first bit of the description, icon. Enough to evoke what it is so you can decide to open it. * User re-ordering of the portlets in the home screen will be disabled to reduce technical risk and support burden. Drag-and-drop as trip hazard. This feature probably comes back in on some subsequent release. * The Theme will be a variant of Respondr with features removed and cut down to just the pieces we need, with some tweaks sprinkled in as needed. * Search is de-scoped to only search MyUW content, and we're dropping the whole search Portlet Event thing. No search of dynamic content, just search over descriptions and other static portlet publication metadata. This will make search radically faster. It also probably makes search implementation radically different in that, at least for the near term in redesigned MyUW, *Search is just another view on Marketplace*. It's entirely feasible to load the entire (filtered-for-the-user) portlet metadata registry down into the browser and perform all the search operations client-side. This will make search radically faster. * The detail-on-this-one-portlet pages in Marketplace will be de-emphasized in favor of ability to see more information through expansion right in the Marketplace list view (in user testing, no one goes to the per-portlet detail page). The per-portlet detail page accessible via deep link will continue to exist so as to provide a suitable target for folks to link to when wanting to tell others about a portlet. And of course * Any of this might change and probably will. :) , and * I've probably already misapprehended some of this. Kind regards, Andrew [1]: This makes Collections of Favorites an awkwardly abandoned partially implemented feature in 4.1. Since it isn't fleshed out enough there to be usable, my feeling is that the Collections of Favorites feature should be removed so it's not a trip hazard. Anyway, I'm not going to take any rash action on that without further discussion, JIRA to track the change, etc. This isn't the thread about hey-let's-delete-that, this is just the thread about hey-here's-an-update-about-that-MyUW-redesign-thing. -- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/uportal-dev
