UCLA's Campus Services web portal provides easy, quick access to business & services information for staff, faculty, students, alumni, visitors and patrons. BruinTech and some of UCLA's portal developers, content managers and support team members gave attendees an in-depth view of the portal, its newest features and its future direction.

Agenda  

• Introduction
• Portal background & overview (Greg Partipilo)
• How the portal enhanced our department's web presence (Betsy Metzgar)
• How usability groups and other input improves the site (Judy Cormier)
• Gateway integration & the new Google search (Anne Pautler)
• Questions & Answers

Q & A Session

This time was more discussion than technical questions. The major points were:

• An attendee suggested the portal consider reversing the way selected channels are highlighted in the left navigation. She felt that instead of making the selected channel in white and shading the non-selected channels, we should reverse it, i.e., shade the selected channel and leave the non-selected channels in white. The panel responded that this suggestion would be presented to the Portal Editorial Board for consideration.  
• An attendee remarked that she didn’t like the use of clickable items in the visual titles on landing pages. She felt it wasn’t intuitive that they were clickable. During the discussion, the panel pointed out that the clickable items were not redundant with the teasers listed below the visual title, and that they represented topics that the respective channel work group felt were the 3 or 4 topics that people would come to a channel 90% of the time to view.
• An attendee inquired if they could take advantage of the new Google Appliance for their department’s web site. Greg Partipilo asked him to stipulate his request in an email following the meeting.
• An attendee remarked that he felt the “how to” articles were great but to him the most important element would be a link to the application that allowed a reader to take the action explained. Greg Partipilo explained that the applicable application is always listed in the Related Information list to the right of the article text.
• An attendee felt that it is misleading to have one graphic in the visual title when you have clickable topics. She thought a separate graphic should be used for each of the clickable topic shown.
• Several people remarked that the portal should be further promoted. Someone suggested a broadcast technology be used to announce new things in the portal to readers.