Hi everybody. Welcome back. Today, we're going to talk responsive design with Heather Newman form the University of Michigan. Good morning Heather. >> Good Morning. >> How are you doing? >> I'm doing very well. How about yourself? >> I'm good thanks. Let's go ahead and jump right to it. What is your role at the University of Michigan? >> I'm Director of Marketing and Communications for the School of Information, which is one of the 19 schools and colleges at the University. So, I oversee all of the school's public relations. I oversee all of its marketing. I oversee all of its communications. Mostly for external audiences, folks outside the University. Excuse me. And I oversee all of the websites and design. >> Okay, well, I'm tired just listening to everything you do. >> [LAUGH] >> And I'm also a little bit in awe, because that sounds like it's a really big mix of both technical, non-technical, working with people. >> I assume a lot of independent work as well. Have you always been part of the tech field? >> I started in technology as a kid, right? Like many of our students, I had a personal computer at home from age ten, I was online from age 12. >> Mm-hm. >> But actually, much of my career has been focused on text. So before I was in marketing and communications, I was a journalist. So I spent 20 years covering, and still do for some outlets, cover technology and video games. And so that's been a large focus for me throughout my working career. >> Okay, but let's talk specifically about the web page and the different things you do. When did responsive design or responsiveness in all these different platforms hit your radar, as something that you needed to make sure that the Site was on top of? >> Really from day one. So when I first started at the School of Information and the websites became sort of part of my purview, It was pretty obvious that the site we had at the time had not been designed to be friendly with mobile devices. And yet, our students, who are fairly advanced, much like the students for this course, I suspect, were already at that point carrying around smart phones. They were already using tablets, which are classified as mobile devices frequently for for websites, certainly were at that point in time. So, the experience that they were getting if they tried to look at our site at that point, or any of our sites really, was not optimal. They were seeing sort of the big websites shrunk down to a little, tiny, screen and the outcome was that folks had a very difficult time using the site and they would frequently abandon it as mobile visitors. >> Really? So what was your approach? I've talked in the class about some of the different ways people can try to design from scratch, or use different sites for mobile versus a single site with different style sheets. How did you go about approaching your response? >> Back in 2011, we initially approached setting up an entirely separate mobile site >> It would still draw from some of the information and some of the articles we have posted on the main site, but it would be structured entirely differently. sort of one of those m dot addresses right? So that people who came in on what we identified as a mobile platform, would see that separate site that was tailored specifically for users of that platform. >> And the reason why we chose to do it at that point in time, was that Google would give preferential search results to people who had specific mobile websites. Or mobile versions of their websites. So if you had somebody who was searching for you on Google, and you had an M dot style website, that would pull up higher up in the search results than if you had a normal website, that had a more responsive design. Google's gotten a lot more sophisticated since then, so that's no longer an issue. And what we discovered was that it was incredibly difficult to try and feed a good amount of information into a mobile website. Without confusing or frustrating people who knew that information was available on the desktop site. But either couldn't get to it in the same way, or they couldn't see everything that they could on the desktop site. And there was no good way for us to sign post, to say this is the point where you really need to go to the desktop to see what you're going to see. So, we actually abandoned those plans even before fully implementing the site. Okay, that must have been painful. >> Yes. [LAUGH] >> As a programmer, I like the students to know that sometimes you just have to chuck out everything you've done so fa,r and it can be really painful for people to do that. And it's great to hear that's not a failure, that's just one of design. That's just what technology is, you know, going back and doing it again. So you know, now you use you know a more sophisticated approach. But still you know after you rolled out, you know the latest sight are there things that ever surprise you now or surprised you? When you had these sites up. >> Well, and we have a series of sites, right, we have the main site for the school, but we also have sub-sites that address some of our specific programs, especially those which are shared with other colleges and schools on campus. So we've had the opportunity to kind of redesign with mobile in mind in a number of places, and it continually surprises me what people want to do, so >> As a school, at the university, for example, you can start your application for the university via our website. It stuns me every year to discover how many students want to begin their application to grad school using their phones. >> Knowing that I'm probably not going to write my essay on my phone, right, but I want to be able to start my application in a way that is easy for me to begin. So at least I can get a sense of, these are the things that are going to be required to apply >> These are the things that I can start to ruminate about. Do I need to include this in my position statement or my essay? And so we needed to support that as part of our mobile approach. And at this point, all of our websites, I believe, are mobile first. In the sense that our students, large percentages of our students and prospective students come in using mobile platforms. Whether they're smaller form factor tablets or whether they're just smartphones. But in either case that's the form factor that we design for now, and the desktop is I guess an additional version that expands on that. Okay, great. So these are exactly the kind of things that I love to hear about, because it's so different when you're out there in the real world, and you're developing these things, and you're dealing with failure. One of the things I always hear from prospective employees, is teach the students how to fail. And I was like, I can't, there are teacher evaluations. >> [LAUGH] >> So I guess my question for you, probably my final question right now, is I know that you hire a lot of developers, and not just developers, but other people who you expect to have some level of technology knowledge, or you know, understanding of HTML. For people who are not computer science majors. For people who are not necessarily coming in with a degree that's, you know, in design or technology specifically, what kind of things do you look for? Just across the board for when you're hiring people to work as part of your group. Really new people. Kind of that first entry level job. >> I think that a lot of, especially for that kind of entry level position. What you're looking for is folks who have taken an initiative to learn things on their own, right. Because they're not necessarily going to have the 20 years of job experience to build up progressively responsible positions that relate to technology. Or to you know the websites, but if they can demonstrate that they've had an interest for awhile, in a particular area. That they're reading, articles, journal articles, you know news stories that relate to developments in the field, that they're doing things like this class, right? To kind of advance their own knowledge. It's an indication that they have an active interest and that they have the willingness to kind of consume information in that field. To be honest, web design changes on a daily basis, right? Every day there is something new that comes in. So having somebody who has a full suite of technical skills up front is great. But if that person can't adapt and can't change those skills as they move on. Then ten years from now you're going to end up with somebody who is a whiz at ColdFusion programming and can put together the best site based on frames you've ever seen, but they're not going to be somebody that can adapt and roll with the new tech. So a lot of folks, when responsive design became such an important priority,for website design. A lot of people were used to designing for the desktop. They wanted everything to be pixel perfect. They wanted everything to look, exactly the same on every screen, and to be like infinitely customizable, right and controllable. That, and some of those people had difficulty adapting. So the more you can prove to me that you have the ability to roll with those punches as they come, and the more you can prove that you're excited about the idea of learning new things and applying them, the more likely I am to consider your application. >> All right great. Thank you so much Heather, I appreciate all your input today, and I hope that you've also gained something from this. Whether it's understanding that yes, it's okay and expected to fail, or really that any little thing you can do to get yourself more engaged in tech is going to help you in all these different fields. So thank you very much.
