CUNY Academic Commons

Thanks for starting the conversation, Laurie.

To spell out the UX challenge a bit more: We currently have a template selection mechanism that assumes that we'll only have a couple options to choose from. See cac-site-layout.png. This quickly becomes unwieldy when we add more templates. So the core idea is that we want an easier way for users to view and select their desired template.

Laurie, you've already spelled out the "additive" vs "subtractive" dichotomy. What "additive" means in this context is that when you start creating a site, you see only the most general layouts (say, the three we already offer); depending on certain actions you take, like the selection of a campus, you'll see more available items. Subtractive would be the opposite: You see all of the templates, and then you use some sort of tool to drill down and/or filter to the ones you want.

There's another, related interface dichotomy to consider: "implicit" vs "explicit" filtering. By "explicit" I would mean an interface where you specifically limit the available templates. See, for example, cbox-template-selector.gif. There's a category dropdown that users can use to filter the available options. The opposite of this would be "implicit" filtering, where the tool shows you only those templates that we've determined, by other means, that you probably want to see. So, for example, we might show the "City College First Year Writing Program" template only if (a) you are using a Student account, and (b) you've selected "City College" as the associated campus, and (c) you've selected "ePortfolio" or whatever for the Site Purpose. Implicit filters are nice because they reduce the need for user action, but they're problematic because it can be difficult for users to find exactly what they're looking for - there's no mechanism for browsing all available templates.

Dovetailing with these interface questions is the question of how the data is carved up. In the example I gave above, I said we could show a given template based on (a) a user's Role, (b) the Associated Campus of the site, and (c) the Site Purpose. These are just three options, but already you can see how this gets really complicated. Say there are 4 templates associated with CCNY, two of which are meant for Faculty and two of which are meant for Students. If you have explicit filter tools, what do they look like? Separate dropdowns? For Commons In A Box OpenLab (cbox-template-selector) we went with the generic "Category" mechanism, because it was a simple dropdown that could be used to capture all sorts of different possibilities.

Hopefully these are some helpful talking points for thinking about the possibilities.