#3: Research & Compiling Information
This post was supposed to go out last week, but I was so busy working on my internship tasks that I forgot! So, this post will be giving an overview of last week.
Last week, most of my energy was focused toward finding out the commencement dates for each of the schools and colleges at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. There has been a lot of feedback about the lack of these dates on the Academic Calendar, so I am helping to make this information easier for users to find.
In doing this, I discovered that every college and school hosts this information differently. The steps it takes to find commencement dates vary wildly from college to college. I also reached out to some SMEs for this information because it wasn’t readily available on their pages.
After gathering these dates, times, locations, and the URLs of where this information can be found, I created a few mockups of what it might look like when this information is implemented on ASR or OneStop pages. I created more than one mockup because there are several places where this information might fit well. I used Figma and Inspect Element for the mockups.
I also created step-by-step instructions on how to find this information for future reference. This information will have to be updated yearly, and because the steps to find this information are wildly different from college to college, a consolidated list of instructions may help whoever does this work after me.
Overall, my key takeaway is that managing content takes a lot of behind-the-scenes work but knowing that it will help users in the end makes it worthwhile. You can also learn a lot while compiling this information.
The next step is to meet with some coworkers and decide where this information might fit best.
Key words: SMEs, research, compilation, organization, instructions