CUNY Academic Commons

Thanks for starting the Google Doc Colin, I added a few suggestions and questions there.

Just wondering- will we be able to change these shortcuts easily, similar to how we are planning a tool to update features sites and groups? I am wondering because it might be nice to update the shortcuts every so often if a new InCommon post, or piece of documentation is created, in order to point people to those spaces.

Another thought I had while reading through the list of shortcuts: the shortcuts needed may be different for new vs. already existing users. For example, a 10-year commons user may not need to see a shortcut to "new to the commons". So, while a new user may need help and guidance, an already existing user may benefit from other shortcuts for their role.

Would we consider having a shortcuts menu for a new users for x amount of time (a week?) before they see the shortcuts associated with their role? This may complicate things so feel free to ignore.

I'd envisioned a system where the links were hardcoded in the codebase, which means that they are not trivial to change - mods would have to go through the dev team and release process. It is certainly possible to build a tool that allows members of the CAC team to manage the links in a UI, though it adds some technical and UX complexity (we'd need ways to visualize and indicate the member-type to which a link belongs, etc).

I'd recommend not yet introducing heuristics for "account age". It complicates the infrastructure, and the benefits are not certain. I suggest starting simple, but taking careful note post-release (perhaps supported by analytics data) of the kinds of additional links that might be useful for certain types of users, and expanding our offerings in future releases.

Thanks for this insight Boone.

For now, the hard coding sounds like the best option and maybe in the future we can think through a tool that will allow the team manage the links.

Point taken re: account age. Perhaps once the shortcuts area has been in place for a semester we can pull analytics on most clicked/used links.

Thanks for helping us work through this, Boone and Laurie. I just went through and cleaned up the feedback and the text -- I settled on four links for each role, and I tried to make them as clear and concise as possible. We were using "Commons" and "on the Commons" a lot as descriptors, which was getting redundant I thought. Scott, thanks for your suggestions as well which are in there now. Perhaps we could all take another spin through and then close this up?

Laurie, regarding your point about including In Common links dynamically, I think we can pull those into the Latest News feed in the wireframes. I started #14256 just now to make sure that we pull from both the Commons news blog and In Common -- new posts to either should get plenty of air in that space, given how much those are both updated.

This list is looking great!

Looks great to me too.

Sorry I'm late to this, getting here by reviewing copy on logged in home page. I think I missed discussion of "role" setting in team meetings. Is there a discussion somewhere of where/how roles will be defined, and how this feature would prioritize when there are multiple roles?

Hi Luke, we'd discussed setting roles via the Role section you're required to check off when you register, and which you can change when editing your profile. As for multiple roles, that's a good point that I don't think we've addressed yet on a technical level. I'll be sure to ask Boone, if he doesn't chime in here himself.

One simple solution might be creating a more general collection of top-level links that we show to anyone with multiple roles, whatever those roles might be. We could also potentially have the role-specific collections cycle, if that's not too complex. I don't know how we'd prioritize one role over another, since it's a standard multiple-choice checkbox when selecting.

Colin is correct on the mechanism that we use to determine user Role.

For the purposes of this ticket, I'd suggest that we internally decide on an order of preference for the roles. For example, if someone is both 'Staff' and 'Alumnus', we might decide that it's generally more salient to show 'Staff' links. As a starting place, we might consider the following order:

Administrator
Faculty
Staff
Undergraduate Student
Graduate Student
Alumnus/a
Postdoc
Other

Users with more than one Role would see the links from the matching Role that's highest in this list.

Just following up here from last Friday's meeting, we were in agreement on Boone's proposal to simply prioritize one role over others for multi-role users in accordance with the list in the last comment.

We also want to give people a heads up that this is being populated by role. Sara, can we add a subtle line about this in the design? Perhaps underneath the Shortcuts header? I think it could say something like "Handy links based on your profile role(s)" and then the "profile roles" phrase could link out to your profile edit view where roles are visible and changeable. Here's mine for example:

https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/colinmcd/profile/edit/group/1/

Thank you, Colin -- I like this idea, though I don't love "handy." Linking to the role interface is a great idea

"Useful links based on your profile role(s)" would be an alternative, thanks Matt.

Perfect!

This is looking good to me, we just need to get that "Useful links based on your profile role(s)" line underneath the shortcuts header with a link to your profile edit view. Here's mine:

https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/colinmcd/profile/edit/group/1/

Sara, maybe you want to update the Figma file with it and then Boone can add it in?

Sounds good. I've made the change.

This has been working well for me in testing.