WebJunction

What do you think of the new site? What can we do to make it better?

Your feedback will help us identify how things are going on the new platform and help us find and prioritize any bugs in the new system. We'll collect any suggestions you may have about how to make improvements for WebJunction members in the future.

As always, WebJunction is a work in progress and we depend on your input to guide our overall development.

You're also welcome to contact us with your feedback.

If you have ideas for the next phase of the new site, be sure to post those in the Site Feature Request Group.

Many thanks for being a part of the WebJunction community. We look forward to hearing from you!

Heck, yeah, that should be there! Sometimes you get strange lists when a developer refers to a graphic design "lorem ipsum" wireframe! With our next install, the drop-down should change to the list below - what do you think??? :

Hi Bill - I saw your tweet as well on the broken friend email links. We're looking into that right now to see what the deal is, thanks for flagging that. On things like interaction with outside social network API's and more/better social tools overall, those are all on the site wish list - we'd love to do them at some later point, but we had to prioritize what we felt would be the core of a good experience for this particular launch.

Great feedback though, most of us are passionate users of a LOT of social networking tools, so we're always looking for ways to make the experience better.

I've been looking around the new Webjunction for about an hour an a half now and have found it a frustrating experience. (I am NOT a novice with web applications, BTW.)

I logged in to webjunction.org, watched the intro video, and edited my profile. Then I started exploring.

First reaction: Pages took a long time to load (typically 5 to 10 seconds on DSL). Also on many pages I had to scroll sideways to see all the content.

Clicked around....got a feel for what was where. Continued to get sluggish page loads.

Then I looked at the course offerings. Saw that the one I wanted was $40. So I thought if I logged in to my affiliate site (me.webjunction.org) I would see a lower price. Not sure why I had to log in to my affiliate site AND the main site. I don't recall having to do that on the old webjunction. At any rate, once I logged in I saw that the course is free through the Maine State Library. Sweet. So I add it to my cart, and then try to check out. No go. Error message says:

"You have entered invalid data. Please try again. You do not have enough "credit" to make this purchase, either remove some of the items in your cart, contact your administrator or the WJ Support Center."

The price was showing as $0.00 - is this a shopping cart problem, or an affiliation problem?

So I give up on that. Start exploring some more. In the process I am taken away from me.webjunction.org to plain webjunction.org and see that I have to log in again. (I have my browser set to accept all cookies...why am I having to log in again?)

Clicked around some more, read some discussions. Found this feedback thread.

In summary, my initial visit included:
- very sluggish page loads
- many pages required sideways scrolling to see everything
- shopping cart did not work
- had to log in to separately to the main site and to my affiliated site (Maine)

Site performance and usability of features did not meet my expectations.

Hi Robert,

The site was optimized for 1024 x 768 browser window, so if you are using 800 x 600 that would result in the need to left/right scroll, but something tells me that is not what you are using. If not, next time you come across a page that requires the left/right scroll, do you mind sending the URL to support@webjunction.org? I am aware of a current bug in how tags are listing that can cause a column to distort; but if there are other issues that are causing the page to widen, we'd certainly appreciate the information.

Regards,
Sharon Streams

Hi Robert,

I am with you on the readability issue: I'm very myopic and prefer the larger font size as well. We increased the base font from that of the old site to 12 pt, and made the fonts relative so that members can use the browser resizing like you are doing. I think the sticking point of trying for a fully liquid layout is that certain portlets (such as the discussions) would end up being squished beyond recognition. 3-column liquid layouts are bit a tricky with our "portlet"-based layout (so I'm told, I'm not the designer), so we went with a semi-liquid layout instead. However, we have the goal of continuing to strive for being a completely Section 508-compatible site, so we will continue to fine-tune the CSS to meet those goals.
(I'll let other folks respond to your follow-ups on course purchasing and affiliiation)

Sharon

Dale, I tried the checkout function again a little while ago. As you suggested, I bypassed the security certificate warning and was able to check-out my course.

Dale asked for instances of the horizontal scrollbar. Here are some example screen shots.

Edit Profile

View Profile
Comments list between Member Info and My Account is really squeezed.

Discussion forum listing
This problem occurs on all discussion forum listings that I look at. (The individual topic threads look fine.)

Compose message
The form elements are widely space. The Body section is too small. The emoticon selector is partly off screen.

The next one is not a horizontal scroll problem, but does have display issues :
Create bookmark

My browser viewing area is set for 1024x768 with a minimum font size of 17pt (which I absolutely need for readability). My operating system is openSUSE (Linux) 10.3 and my browser is Firefox 2.0.0.15

There is a problem with comments left on "My WebJunction" page by others. i would expect to get the person's profile when I click on their name. It just recycles back to the comment page.

Hi Bill,

It is great to have our members exploring the site and pointing out ways we can improve the member experience! I will submit the issues you raised around the disappearing links on profile pages, the need for a link to the person's profile from their posted comments, and that it would be helpful to have a new posts link at the top of the forum pages to our support folks.

Cheers,
Laura Staley

Bob, thanks for raising this issue. The new WJ site does perform better on Firefox and IE 7.0 than on IE 6.0. I will share your feedback with our support team.

Regards,

Hi Bob,
The site was optimized for 1024 x 768 browser size, so that it would not require any left/right scrolling if set to that or higher (600 x 800 will require scrolling). However, it looks like the Discussions missed the boat by about 5 pixels, which is why you are getting the scroll bar. We need to do a little adjustment to the padding settings and column widths.

Yes, having the discussions paginated would reduce load time, esp for those popular forums like St. Jerry's. That feature request has been captured.

Thanks so much for taking the time to send your feedback.
Regards,
Sharon Streams

Thanks Bill,

I'm going to pass on your report to our support and development gurus and they will investigate the problem.

-Kendra

Thanks Ross. The example really helps. We'll keep you posted on RSS fixes.

JP

Hi Ross,

Yes, we are noticing some intermittently strange behavior with the RSS feeds. That functionality is currently getting poked with a stick, so we hope to have a fix in place soon so that it works consistently.

Sharon

Thanks for the report Bob - I have noticed the same issue in my account. I will notify our support team about the issue.

-Kendra

Hi Laura -

Good point about the feed names. I don't have a real answer for this, but I do have a Google Reader workaround in the meantime.

In GR, select the unnamed feed, and then click on the Feed Settings button in the upper right of the screen. One of the options there is "Rename subscription". This allows you to enter anything for the name you want GR to display for the feed. Pretty useful even for a lot of feeds that come with names.

Dale

Ross,
There's no preview option when you edit your profile (a great idea though!), but after you make edits, you can see what your public profile looks like by clicking on your name in the "My Account" area, in the right rail. There's lots of information about your profile and making edits to it in the short video: Edit Your Account.

Thanks for posting,
JP

Just noting that the home page now loads in a reasonable amount of time (less than 10 seconds anyway) ... but, unfortunately, the "My WebJunction" page takes more than 30 seconds. Since this is where *my* WebJunction experience begins it is far too slow, especially as the current design forces me back to it in order to find conversations.

I can of course "go back" via the browser, but this would not work for an active community site ... the "very new responses" wouldn't appear.

Just now noted that the activity on "My WebJunction" labeled as 8-28 (today) probably occurred the previous day ... I know that at least some did (my own post of yesterday) and assume the rest are because this is early, WJ time.

Just noting that when I, or a friend, join a new group the notification on my "MyWebjunction" page is given twice.

The following was copied from my "My WebJunction page, supposedly showing recent activity:

* * *

You deleted a reply to the discussion thread "Re: Public Library Photography Policy".
You deleted a reply to the discussion thread "Re: What would you tell a new Director about WebJunction?".
Chrystie Hill deleted a reply to the discussion thread "Re: What would you tell a new Director about WebJunction?".
You deleted a reply to the discussion thread "Re: Library Call Center".

* * *

I didn't delete anything at this time and had not visited those discussions.

I don't know if its me, but I'm having timeout issues with webjunction. I tend to take a while when posting replys to posts, sometimes I'm interrupted for 5 min up to an hour before I can finish it and hit post. I'm finding that any time I take more than a few minutes, my session has timed out. VERY IRRITATING! If feels like its a 3 minute timeout. I can't think of any reason to have it expire in that short a time.
???????

I'm using Firefox 3.x to load the site.

Thanks!

I just want to thank WJ development staff for installing pagination ... really helps with the longer discussions!

The pagination is fine, Tim. Navigation *to* discussions, though, is very difficult unless someone you've friended posts and you're informed of it (not always accurate, btw).

Bad timing from me for bringing this up! Now I gotta listen to Chrystie rant about this in the office and now ON WebJunction, too.

Seriously Bob, we hear you loud and clear. Right now we're trying to decide how best to deliver a solution for the long term (as Chrystie mentioned... is this something we budget development resources for or can we do it via content/programming efforts?). We'll keep you in the loop!

Thanks to the pointer to Caucus, Bob. I had seen it briefly a couple years ago -- it looks like they've continued improving it. The University of Washington has a similar (probably less sophisticated) tool for online learning/communication. It sometimes came up a little shy in the feature department, but was a rock solid tool for conversations with classmates.

I appreciate how Caucus folks allude to the complexity inherent in adding things like a CMS (and LMS) to the mix. We've done some really great stuff integrating those essential systems on the Next WebJunction platform; we just need to rejigger the machine to bump up discussion/group discoverability a bit.

Piece of cake, right?

The following showed up on my "My WebJunction" page:

You have registered for the course titled "Problem Solving: Generating Alternatives".

Did not!

Noting that when I (just now!) clicked on:

Jennifer Peterson created the discussion thread "webinar on social learning".

I was taken to "My Account."

This happens fairly often, making it hard to participate.

All library types except Public are listed here:

http://www.webjunction.org/library-type

I really think "How to use Webjunction" would be a great breakout for the ILF conference.

Hi James -- that's a great point. We've had a number of requests to increase the "primary" and "secondary" lists. We're still looking at options but I can tell you that some flavor of ILL (acquisitions and/or collection development is another) is coming soon.

Thanks much for your feedback.

Hi Bob,
Thanks for reporting this--our QA testing chocolate obviously got into your email peanut butter. Our dev team has made a database change and modified our conversion scripts which should prevent this in the future.

Best,
Sharon

Hi Ross, The discussion board is under the parent Technical Services page: http://www.webjunction.org/technical-services/-/resources/discussion. I've added a link to the Digitization page.

Sharon