Cal Poly Knowledge Base Gigi Choy Alex Kleissner Eric Litak Frank Vasquez Brandon Wirick

Outline  Problem Description  Data Collection Results  Recommendations  Design Process Functionality Modeling Prototyping

Problem Description  Create a knowledge base to support the Genius Bar in the Learning Commons  Users need quick answers to common technical questions Learn to solve their own problems Reduce the need for geniuses to have to answer the same questions over and over

Problem Description  Lack of central resource for technical information on Cal Poly’s webpages Information spread out amongst multiple technical departments No apparent organization of help documents Difficult to find specific answers quickly

Data Collection from Princeton KB  Users prefer to type in searches, instead of browsing to find answers  Users want alternative search methods when one method doesn’t produce desired results  Users prefer full text searches, instead of keyword searches  Users don’t like to read through or scroll through lots of text

Data Collection from Princeton KB  Users want to be able to restrict a text search to a category  Users want short paths to information  Users become confused when unrelated links are grouped together  Users are more drawn to pages where there is a stark contrast between the text and background

Recommendations - search tools  Make search field more prominent  Use full text searches, like Google  Allow user to search outside the KB  Rate individual search results according to how useful they are  Provide categories and FAQs

Recommendations - navigation  Keep unrelated links separate  Provide frequently used links on every page  Add a hyperlinked index of subsections at the top of long articles  Highlight search Keywords

Recommendations – visual aspects  Use a plain background with darker text that is easier to read  Add icons  Use bold/colored text to make topics stand out more

Design Process – Functionality  Text Searches  Browsing by category  FAQs  Access open problem tickets  Genius profiles

Enabling Good HCI  Consistency is important for HCI  Having lots of consistent content is difficult with HTML  XML to the rescue!  The CPKB is written entirely in XML All HTML content is XHTML+CSS XML files are rendered using XSLT XML files are schema-valid

Benefits of XSLT  Data can be separated from how it is displayed Only write the data in one place Join data from multiple documents using the document() function Loop through, sort, test, transform, or erase data elements at display time  Pages can be set up to be data-centric, not display-centric