UX Update for Podium Master Pages

UX Update for Podium Master Pages

Posted on 25. Aug, 2011 by in Articles

By: Jackie Christensen, Product Manager

On Wednesday, August 31st, six Podium Master Pages are getting an updated design treatment to bring them up to par with Directory. These pages include:

  • Assignments
  • Athletics
  • Calendar
  • Media Gallery
  • News
  • Search

Some of you may be wondering, “What is a Podium Master Page?” Others may be saying, “What does UX mean?” Let’s try to alleviate some of the head scratching.

A Podium Master Page displays in the left hand navigation of the site when the sign in box is expanded. These pages come with the Podium software off the shelf and therefore do not need to be built by the Page Manager. Their availability is determined by the Platform Manager. They are geared towards the insider school community and are designed to pull in user specific content from Role and Group associations upon login.

UX (an acronym all the cool kids use to shorten the term User Experience) refers to the thoughts and feelings a person has while using a product, system or service. WhippleHill is undergoing an effort to improve the UX for the pages most used by your insider community including Parents, Students, Teachers, Staff and Alums. This means a refreshed design and a focus on making pages touch friendly for tablet users.

Want to see more and also get some ideas on how to roll this out to your community? Please join us on Wednesday, September 7th at 1pm EDT for the Master Page Redesign: Release Details and Training Tips webinar.

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3 Responses to “UX Update for Podium Master Pages”

  1. samantha evans

    25. Aug, 2011

    TThe new directory looks great. But it is very slow, to the point that users think it is broken. Are all the new pages going to built on the same format with the same issue?

    Are there talking points for us to share with our constituents before the rollout happens?

    Reply to this comment

  2. Jackie Christensen

    26. Aug, 2011

    Hi Sam,

    I checked out your Directories and noticed you have created an All Community View that includes 20 Roles, 12 Filters and over 15,000 results. We are aware of performance issues with larger Directories. Thank you for pointing out a good example. We will continue working on improving performance.

    In the meantime, to give your community a better experience, I would recommend removing that Directory View and sticking with the 5 other Views you have created. Try to keep total results in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands.

    I do not anticipate a performance difference with the other Master Pages after next week’s release. Directory has the most expensive query out of all the Master Pages. It’s not only matching keywords but also taking Profile Publish Access and Role to Role security settings into account.

    We are adding a Master Page section to the Help Center which will be available in advance of the release. Here’s a sneak peek: http://screencast.com/t/anN2sBCasW6

    I’m also going to make a training template that is geared towards your end users (Parents, Employees, Alums, etc) that I will post in the Help Center and show off during the webinar on 9/7. I had my listening ears on during the Creating User Guides Open Space session I sat in on at the UC. :)

    Thanks for the feedback!
    Jackie

    Reply to this comment

    • Samantha Evans

      29. Aug, 2011

      Jackie,

      We had the same slowness issue before we added the “all role” search directory.

      Some of our users don’t know what role people are in, so after more than a dozen requests, we added it.

      Looking forward to your end-user training materials! ;)

      I’m still looking for ‘simple english’ personal calendar view docs…seems to be too great a beast for anyone to tackle.

      Reply to this comment

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