1. Texas Legacy Project LIS 385T Information Architecture and Design
December 3, 2002
Gilok Choi Chad Hutchens Nadalia Liu Libby Peterek John Stubbe Patrick Williams

2. Background What is Texas Legacy? Ongoing project Goals Audio page
Text section
Landscapes
Transcripts
Ongoing project
Goals
Educate
Create awareness
Developing a historical record
Garnering support for environmental initiatives

3. Texas Legacy Project Planning Analysis Design Verification
Construction
Maintenance

4. Our Goals Meeting the needs, wants, and desires of our client
Accommodating scalability (for additional content and video length concerns)
Considering technical limitations of audience
Making site accessible to all users
Organizing content for intuitive information seeking
Indexing/labeling content
Reengineering navigation

5. Our Goals (cont’d) Promoting multiple browsing options Branding
Geographical
Topical
Personal
Branding
Focusing on video as primary content
Developing a clear access point for the materials
Providing a “face” for the project

6. Planning Review site materials
Discuss navigation schemes, audience, and current design with David Todd
Logo (even though we don’t like it, we have to keep it)
Discuss media options with David Todd
Word files and HTML for transcripts?
Many users will be on dial-up
Minimal use of Javascript
Need to use lots of pictures of people

7. Planning (cont’d) Other issues
Using unknown narrators as site’s focal point
Presenting the goal of the site (promoting Texas conservation) while simultaneously making users aware of the site’s functionality (video presentation)
Multiple media!!!
Broadband video, dial-up video, broadband video with captioning, dial-up video with captioning, broadband audio, dial-up audio, broadband audio with captioning, dial-up audio with captioning, text only: HTML and Word.

8. Analysis What do people want to use this site for? Education
Entertainment
Research
Public advocacy
Realistic to view 2 hour video?
Not unless it’s indexed and easily searched. Especially true for users with slow connections.
File size and length (opted for 35 2-minute excerpts).

9. Analysis (cont’d)
Possible to index and excerpt? Not currently. However, the database will eventually serve video chunks
How much of the site can be dynamically generated?
Pages for narrators with links to media
Region and Topic pages
Does maintaining the bulk of the data in the database affect search engine results?
Need for 2 on-site search engines? Searching site vs. search database. (Very little content within the static pages; majority of content is located in database.)

10. More Analysis Search vs. Browse? Home page components?
Help users use the site
Show narrator photos
How will users know what to do from the beginning?
How to group media, topics, narrators, and keywords?
Footage log keywords vs. Uniform topics

11. Design Useful home page Browsing index
Offering options for video, audio, transcript
Templates
Using the database to populate templates

12. Verification
Pros and cons of using an expert (organization, labels, taxonomies)
Regions
Topics
Card sorting
Expert input
Excerpts vs. Full-length videos
Heuristic evaluation

13. Construction Site map Image map of Texas for browsing Navigation bar
Database content spreadsheet
Templates
Descriptive imagery on home page (Real Player slideshow)

14. Maintenance
Use of database and db input interface allow for quick and easy maintenance and updating.
Use of a Cascading Style Sheet ensures that new content will be consistent.

15. Post-Mortem If we’d known then…:
Establish better content and project management protocols.
Use video stills for all narrator portraits because the originals are of inconsistent quality (old vs. new)
Usability testing
Explanation of streaming media (like NOAA EPIC Getting Started)

16. Post-Mortem (cont’d) Ideas for the next phase:
Redesign the timeline to make it more interactive and useful
Synonym rings for searching the database (regions, topics)
Develop process for deleting files from the database
Link the database's search capabilities with fully indexed video chunks