Top Universities reach the world with Online Service

The Globe and Mail recently reported on an initiative called OpenCourseWare lead by MIT and other top U.S. schools, such as Stanford and Berkeley. This is a great example of using internet technology to increase the power of an organizations offering.

You may be wondering, why would MIT, or the other 100 universities worldwide, give away all this course material for free, how is that a worthwhile offering? (You still actually need to go to MIT to get a degree – that cannot be done online)

Here is my take:

Awareness & Trial: Placing valuable content online will drive a huge number of people to the MIT site and allow them to get a taste of the quality of the education. This will likely result in much larger and global audience with significantly more impact than any advertisement could. Only internet technology has the power to enable a program with this much reach.

Prestige: MIT and others are in the business of prestige. They need to be at the forefront of knowledge, recruiting the best professors, only taking the best students, and making sure everyone knows they are the best. By broadening the audience of a professor from a lecture hall to the world, these universities will be able to empower their professors to make an even bigger impact and garner more prestige. This might even result in better teaching if reputations start being made off of courses and not just research/publications.

Furthermore, many of the users of these materials are professors and students at other institutions, who are adapting their teaching/courses to the MIT material. This is a huge compliment that only increases the allure of MIT. (If properly cited – of course)

Usability will be critical: For both the end user and the professor/administrator an easy to use system will be critical. For the end-user it is straightforward, if you can’t easily understand and navigate through the material then the experience will degrade, not enhance, the perception of the university.

For professors/administrators the time spent maintaining the courseware catalogue could be a significant cost in terms of time and distraction if it’s not designed to fit well with how these staff members operate.

There are many content management systems out there that could theoretically “do the job”, after all it’s just posting text, documents, and video to a website … right? Not quite. To create a system that really hits the mark and makes it easy for both the users and professors, they will need to develop a custom system. That’s why in Stanford’s Open CouseWare Business plan they call for a custom web application, and Berkeley is focusing on an automated system to record and post lectures.

Globe&Mail Article

Usability Defined

A key focus of what we do at Trioro is ensuring the websites and solutions that we build are "usable".  A few posts that will come in the near future will help define how we interpret some of the terms used to understand usability.  I'll start right there - with the definition of "usability".

Usability is an understanding of how easy it is for a person to interact with a computer.

At Trioro it is important that we build websites that make sense to the people using them. It is important that the websites we build are easy to use and effective at getting the job done.

A usable website has the following qualities:

• easy to understand
• easy to navigate
• very obvious functionality
• familiar (even for new visitors)
• pleasing

For anyone using a website they should be able to get what they came for in a fast, effective way. You're probably familiar with the term "user friendly" which implies that a website is highly usable.

Understanding your audience is key to building a good, usable website. The resources on a website must be presented accordingly. Casual web users need overly obvious navigation. While financial investors need advanced analytic functionality that behaves just like the spreadsheets they're used to.

At Trioro we use scenarios to make sure that websites are highly usable. It is absolutely necessary to describe and understand your audience by "walking in their shoes". Describing scenarios which detail the interaction a visitor has with the website will ensure a usable tool is built.

If you're interested in more on the topic, check back here for continued posts. And in the mean time, check out these web links on the definition of usability:

• ISO Usability Definition
• Wikipedia
• Usability.gov

Why we use Silverlight on Trioro.com

You may have wondered why we chose to use Silverlight on our own site, while we use Flash on our client’s sites. It’s really about looking to the future.

Looking to the future:

Flash is currently the standard, and is already installed on practically every computer. For our clients this is a good thing and what we typically recommend for the time being.

However, Microsoft Silverlight is a new technology that will help us improve the interaction and user experience for our clients. Though not as widespread as Flash currently, Silverlight is gaining fast and works across systems –even non-Microsoft. The plug-in (what you need to have to view a Silverlight site) is free and is quite fast and simple to install. Once installed it doesn’t not require any other change from the user, so it’s really quite painless. (Download Silverlight Now)

Also, with Microsoft sites ranked number one in Canada for visitors (from Com-Score) and NBC’s online Olympic coverage being delivered by Silverlight, its growth doesn’t look like it will slow down anytime soon.

Putting the technology to use on our own site is a small investment now, which will allow us to deliver more value to our clients in the long run.

Download Silverlight>

Designing customer experiences - New?

To some it seems that designing customer experiences is a completely new phenomenon.

I've been reading Polar Unlimited's blog, since being introduced to them through a mutual client, and have been reminded again of the business world's continued focus on "design thinking" and "customer experience".

In 2002, Roger Martin (Dean of the Rotman School of Management) created the Desautels Center for Integrative Thinking to bring together design and business thinking "to change the way business schools teach business". P&G's CEO has over the last several years been leading a transformation of the largest package goods company in the world to a design focused company. And more recently, Microsoft has launched Expression Studio, a suite of tools to make it easier for designers and developers to work together to create better user experiences for web and windows applications. The launch in Toronto was accompanied by a presentation from NextD on the future of design to solve the worlds "wicked problems".


However, designing customer experiences is not new.

From Shakespeare and Motzart to George Lucas, Cirque du Soleil, and Nuit Blanche (which I had the pleasure to attend this year in Toronto). Individuals and organizations have aspired to capture the hearts and the minds of their audience. To engage and delight, to awe and inspire; sometimes for purpose and sometimes for play. (there is a reason that the word "art" appears in the title of Roger Martin's The Art of Integrative Thinking)

A focus on design and experience is not new, but it is incredibly important.

What is new is the means. The tools and technology to design customer experiences is ever-evolving, and the online world is the new stage. I don't think anyone can claim to have completely figured it out yet - and that's why Trioro exists. We're here to help our clients apply these new online technologies, and find the path to delivering great experiences online.

Trioro's Focus

This is the first post since the visual expression (the re-design of our own site) of our company’s renewed focus: building business by unleashing internet technology on your most important business objectives.

In this blog we will provide ideas, information, and commentary on the ever changing world of internet technology, its impact on businesses like yours, and what is most important to get right. We want to help you win in your industry by bringing strategy and technology together in a creative way that delivers results. This blog will hopefully be a useful resource in the pursuit of that goal.

Hope you like it