It’s been a little while since I’ve done a Week in Review!

This was the first week with the Web Team’s new designer, Justin McDowell. He’s getting himself set, which makes me realize how much I’ve already figured out in just four months. 🙂 Also, how helpful my previous experience at Pierce College was, and how helpful it is to have two family members who attended Evergreen.

But now we can start to set up common processes and systems, toss out old stuff, start big new stuff. So that’s very cool.

This week I worked quite a bit on OARS (Online Academic Records System) — some personas work, which I find I really enjoy both the research and the writing. (I was a creative writing major at UPS. Go figure.) And also some UX work with the very first bit of the system. I’ve never done UX design in Excel, and yet for this piece it was exactly the right tool. Since, really, it’s just a table. The OARS project team has a cowork/meeting one morning a week, and we mostly worked on that — clarifying from what I’d done and what the lead developer had done, and getting to something that made sense to the whole team, and that we think will be good for students…someday.

I also did lots and lots of Google Analytics reporting, which can be mind-numbing, but then there are flashes of insight. Those are kind of delightful; it even included discovering that something I’d done was actually helpful to our site visitors, measurably so!

There’s been one incredibly dull project that’s also incredibly necessary to move some other projects along. TBH, it’s sort of nice sometimes to just have something quiet and routine to do.