In the Colorado Mesa University catalog website I inherited almost 1000 pages reviewed every year through the curriculum process (committees, Board of Trustees, state and federal commissions) and through the catalog review process (workflows that include stops for pages at specific offices campus-wide). There is a yearly effort to improve those processes and to improve the user experience of the catalog (both software and website) as well as the learning aids and FAQ information.
The content management system itself is fairly cumbersome and currently I have to defer design to the marketing department. My biggest accomplishments with the catalog have been:
- Project Management - blindly jumping in to manage this cyclical project from a new system no one on campus had completed an iteration with yet and planning well enough to make the transition from a paper based process to an online process without any major hiccups.
- User Experience Design - addressing several Human-Computer Interaction issues based on user feedback after the first iteration that brought some elements of the User Experience Honeycomb by Peter Morville to an otherwise very basic an fairly uninteresting layout.
- static print button on the bottom right
- back to top button on the bottom right
- better use of accordions, tabs, and other time/space/patience relieving elements
