CUNY Academic Commons

Boone,
I have a few questions for you in order to work on a proposed design solution for this.

1. Are we planning on filtering or sorting results?
2. Can we build it in a way so the filtering/sorting happens without a page load?

This is for everyone,

These are the current sorting options on each of these content types:
PEOPLE: Last Active, Newest Registered, Alphabetical
GROUPS: Last Active, Newly Created, Alphabetical
SITES: Last Active, Newest, Alphabetical

New possible filters:
Since we have added the meta data fields during the last release we filter Groups and Sites as well as Courses by the following:
GROUPS: Campus, Primary Purpose, Academic Term, Disciplinary Cluster
SITES: Campus, Primary Purpose, Academic Term, Disciplinary Cluster
COURSES: Campus, Primary Purpose, Academic Term, Disciplinary Cluster

Anything else we should include or anything you feel we shouldn't include?

Sonja Leix wrote:

Boone,
I have a few questions for you in order to work on a proposed design solution for this.

1. Are we planning on filtering or sorting results?
2. Can we build it in a way so the filtering/sorting happens without a page load?

1. Could do either or both. I think the main idea here is filtering, but we can also include sorts as you see fit. Some sorts may be easier than others. The following are fairly straightforward: alphabetical; by academic term; by created date.

2. Yes. https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/ is one such UI pattern. Not suggesting we use that specifically, but we can definitely do something along those lines.

Exploring and thinking through this task more revealed that simply adding another layer of filtering to the existing ways for a user to explore these landing pages (through search and sorting) would introduce too much UI. This will likely overwhelm the user and I would not recommend surfacing all these options top level and as equal in priority.

Ideally we can better understand the user's needs and design a solution that will help solve it.
This begs the following questions:
1. Do we have any data on how users currently use search and sorting on Groups and Sites?
2. Do we have any specific user needs that were communicated to our team in regards to filtering and/or search? Things users have trouble with? What ways to discover content would be most helpful?
3. Do we have a sense of the priority of content discovery for users: search vs. filters vs. sorting?

We've begun collecting some data on usage of current searching/filtering. It suggests that the Campus filtering is important, sensibly enough, but we need a bigger sample size on some other parts so stand by on data collection there.

Matt and I took a look at the OpenLab Courses page and were wondering if we could explore building off of the functionality there.

https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/courses/

The sidebar offers school filtering, then filtering by department and semester. You can also sort by active, newest, and alphabetical (though the labeling could perhaps indicate more that you're sorting there and not filtering). Search is also there, which is essential for our implementation, but doesn't seem to add much to the sidebar visually or confuse at first glance.

Sonja, perhaps it would be good to see in the next mockup an idea of the ways in which you think including functionality like this might be overwhelming. Or could you explain a bit more what you think we might want to avoid visually, looking at that OpenLab example? I think we see a pretty close priority between search, filtering and sorting, but that order is roughly how we'd place the importance of each on their own.