EconCS Website User Experience

Welcome, Open Scholar User!

OpenScholar is a self-service platform that is available to the Harvard community for creating and maintaining academic websites, whether individual biographies, labs or faculty.

Resources

Open Scholar online tutorials - Refer to this information to publish your digital content.
SEAS identity guidelines - Ensure a positive user experience and branding.
Harvard Online Accessibility - Make your content accessible to a broad range of users by referring to the Content Creator 10 Essentials.

User Experience considerations

In addition to the guidelines listed here, test your work in progress with typical users of your website (or individuals with a similar profile). Testing takes very little time but it yields great benefits, as you confirm your design choices, improve user experience and gather useful feedback.

Usability

A usable interface has three main outcomes:

It should be easy for the user to become familiar with and competent in using the user interface during the first contact with the website. For example, if a research website is well-designed, the user should be able to move through the sequence of actions to find a specific publication, its authors, etc.
It should be easy for users to achieve their objective through using the website. A user with the goal of booking a flight, would be guided through the easiest process to purchase a ticket.
It should be easy to remember the user interface and how to use it on subsequent visits.

^{(Reference: Interaction Design Foundation)}

Accessibility

An accessible website can be independently perceived, understood, navigated, and operated by as many individuals as possible, regardless of any disabilities.

Page Title: Provide unique, concise HTML page titles to help a broad range of users to quickly understand the content and purpose.
Information Structure: Structure your content in a logical, meaningful way.
Headings: Use section headings help visual users quickly scan and understand web pages for efficient navigation.
Semantic Markup: Use heading elements correctly (e.g., <h1>...<h6>) to provide efficient navigation to individuals with visual disabilities.
Legibility: Use clear text, simple words and sentences, so that information is easy to understand.
Readability: Make visual displays clean and uncluttered, and easy to read.
Links: Make links descriptive to provide clear context to users. For example, instead of 'click here' use 'click here to view course list'.
Image Alternatives: Provide a text alternative for each image in order to make the content and purpose of the image accessible.
Media Alternatives: All video that includes audio should have accurate, synchronized captions or a full-text transcript. Captions autoatically produced by YouTube shall be checked and edited for proper casing, punctuation and spelling.

^{(Source: Harvard Online Accessibility, Indiana University, Oregon State University)}

Mobility

Ensure that digital content can be successfully accessed from a mobile device:

"Mobile in mind" - Design with mobile in mind as you create your website to ensure simplicity and effectiveness.
Scalable Navigation - Make critical content easy to navigate.
Avoid horizontal scrolling - Ensure content wraps, including blocks of images or text.
Font type and size - Make content readable and the font size scale appropriately.
Input methods - Ensure that interactive elements (links, buttons, checkboxes, etc.) have enough space around them to allow easy selection and interaction.

SEAS Computing assistance

Whether you begin with new content or need to migrate existing content, let us guide you through the features of Open Scholar. (Contact us directly)

SEAS Open Scholar training

Consider attending a short SEAS Open Scholar training session. You and other administrators of your website will benefit form our quick overview. We could also tailor this introductory class to the specific needs of your website. (Contact us directly)