TSR StaffBlog

And so another busy week ends…

My work consists of organising, setting up and monitoring the ad campaigns, and working on a mixture of both small and larger projects. In addition to this, I am still continuing with all my supermodding duties.

Some of the projects we are working on you have already heard about, including the communications project, and evaluating and extending the subs package. We’ve had loads of feedback from the subs about the type of features they’d like to see, which is great. I’m in the process of pulling it altogether and categorising things, ready for a discussion with the rest of the office.

Another project we’re working on is the piloting of a ‘classified’ forum, which the members have requested on several occasions. This would be a place where members can advertise certain things such as old school or university textbooks. We had a meeting/discussion about this last week and again, I’m in the process of pulling stuff together - working out how we can best implement it, what dev work is required etc etc. Watch this space for more information/updates.

The other week we had Phillipa come in for the day - she is currenting iterning for Herts Uni and has been around offering help during the results period giving out advice on clearing. She came in for us to train her a bit about TSR and for her to train two members who had volunteered to help out with giving clearing advice. Keep an eye out for her in the Uni forums now results are out!

That’s all for now, I think. Have good weekends!

Fleur

The Student Room received record visits on A-Level results day (14th of August) as students flooded to the site to compare their grades and discuss options.

We received a whopping 108,513 visits, significantly higher than the previous top traffic day which was 92,911 set earlier this year and over double the visits we received on results day 2007.

We were also pleased to see The Student Room receive some great coverage in The Times’ Student Guide suppliment on results day. Click the image below to read a larger version:

Join in the discussion about this instance of TSR press coverage here:

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?p=13863753

Yesterday I gave my presentation on Communication as part of a discussion of the subject with CN, J, RK and fleur de lis.  In this discussion we identified a number of key problems in communication at present both in communication to Acumen by the users and in the way Acumen communicate back.    It was noted for example that Admin are extremely busy off site and as such having lots of places for them to have to check to find threads quoted for their attention often means there simply isn’t enough time to find and deal with all the threads.  Users not fully appreciating how little time people in the office have to browse and post on the site get understandably miffed when their thread gets missed.  A range of solutions were suggested, hopefully users will start to see the benefit of them in the not too distant future.  This presentation was not the close of the project though, it’s very much an ongoing thing and any constructive suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Another big thing in the pipeline is a change to the subs package, feedback we’ve received from our users about the subscribers package have bemoaned it’s lack of flexibility and the limited range of methods to buy it.  In addition with a rethink of rep also in the pipe line possibly leading to subs losing the extra rep functions  and the significant improvements in site carrying capacity removing any advantage to the no busy messages element too, the package is long overdue an update.  One of the possibilities we’re considering is a modular system where for a range of prices depending upon the number of elements chosen members can pick the elements of the subscription they are interested in.  Obviously this would add extra complexity and may not be feasible.  The other element of the project is finding new functionality to add to the package.  Your suggestions on a postcard.

The last big thing to tell you about is the arrival of fleur de lis to work part time in the office.  Given how crazy the work load is getting over the clearing period it’s great to have the extra pair of hands.

- Nefarious

I’ve been putting together the documentation for two of our future site updates - customisable homepage and alternative coloured templates. This involves writing in fine detail how these bit of functionality should look and work, passing these briefs to our designer and web developers and then discussing how, by who, and when it will be delivered.

On the updated version of the homepage users will be able to opt to show just the functionality they wish to see, remove or minimise functional elements and drag them around the screen to position them. As part of this update we have to turn the existing homepage functionality into ‘widgets’, like those seen in the side bar. We’ll also be looking to enhance some of the existing homepage functionality by giving users the means to configure the settings of the homepage widgets, for example show how many elements they want, or show items from just the forums the users are interested in.

For the colour templates we are going to initially produce six options which users can choose from by clicking on the ‘customise’ link on the page. Among the choices they’ll definitely be a darker template and a pinky option.

As with any updates to functionality when you start looking into detail about implementation lots of issues and questions are thrown up so there have been several chats in the office and late night calls onto our developers to talk around the issues. The functionality is looking really good and we are looking at having this available for users before the summer is out.

I had an interesting meeting with a large organisation who provide health information last week. They are interested in working with us to communicate their health awareness messages to students. Topics on their communication agenda range from emergency contraception to the demystification of the cervical cancer vaccination. What made the meeting interesting was that rather than just providing static information pages this potential partner are keen to engage with students through interactive page elements and may even provide one to one chats with health professionals. Early days but all very cool stuff that our users could find useful.

All around the country students will be beginning to get apprehensive about exam results day. We at TSR HQ are getting a little twitchy too. The period around results day is the busiest time on the site and this year we anticipate over 100,000 visits a day during the peak of Clearing. For the past few months we’ve been getting the site ready for this massive surge in visitor levels, making sure that the site can cope with the volume but also working to produce some useful resources for people who have just got their results and may be confused their options.

 Our 2008 Clearing homepage is coming on nicely and the articles seen there have been written by a number of our users. We’ve been asking students who’ve been through the Clearing process to share their Clearing Experiences and thanks to Mustard Man for the most recent addition there. As always our ‘What take to university’ articles continue to grow - I hope they are making student halls bigger these days to accomadate this stuff :)

We hope you’re enjoying your summer break assuming you are off school/college/uni now.

- J

A swan glides majestically across a river only because its legs are working frantically underwater.  Thin bird legs aren’t ideal for moving 7.5kg of feather and flight muscle across a body of flowing water.  This week it became clear that the relaxed, easy going nature of the office hid the frantic legs kicking away keeping the site moving.

Now I have a confession to make, those adverts that are annoying you, following you around trying to convince you that you really do want to book cheap hotel rooms  or that you want nothing more than to complete your studies in Southend (if you aren’t a sub at least) I’m responsible for them. Some of them anyway, advert management is a huge job and I can’t emphasise that enough:  They’re fiddly to set up. They have to be carefully targeted according to fairly exacting requests from the person buying the advert which is fiddly. When not enough people click on an advert (you need to monitor all the adverts to make sure they are doing ok which is fiddly and time consuming)  you have to try and work out why that particular advert is doing badly in relative terms; fiddly and seldom obvious.  You then have to go and change how that advert is targeted (which is fiddly) whilst avoiding a situation where….etc. etc.

It’s what RK spend s a good chunk of his time doing when he isn’t analysing site usage, drawing up spreadsheets planning the distribution upcoming advertising campaigns, answering the phone, sorting out subscriptions on coursework.info…. etc. etc.

It seems to be a reoccurring theme in this post that it’s not worth finishing paragraphs, as describing anyone’s jobs or indeed any major task in any depth turns what’s supposed to be an interesting blog into a huge list. The fact is there’s a lot to do, typical office hours seem to be 9 till 6 every day (although often we work later) with a working lunch break.  Unusually we spent today’s lunch outside the office, in a rather good Thai restaurant, however, for the most part the conversation was business and J took down notes as we went.

It’s Wii night tonight (friday) though so the speakers will thunder out discordant twanging as we try and fail to play Raining Blood on Guitar hero.  Ironically the office will seem it’s most frantic when we’re all relaxing.

- Nefarious

Spending the summer on the British south coast, for many years holiday destination of choice for the nation, what could possibly go wrong…

Quite a lot actually it seems, for a start no one seems to have told the weather that it’s supposed to be summer, on arrival I was greeted by leaden skies, torrential rain and I was almost blown out to sea on two separate occasions; and there’s been no real improvement since. I was cheerfully informed as I was shown around my flat that if I turned the oven off the wrong way it would kill me and that the night before my arrival there had been a party in the building that lasted until six am. Not only that but my landlady doesn’t allow shoes in the flat and had left me a list of do’s and don’ts three pages long…

The flat itself is lovely, plenty of space, plenty of light, or at least there would be plenty, if the sun was ever out, and it’s in a nice area, very nice in fact. There’s a park opposite with tennis courts a bowls club and a play park that hasn’t been vandalised yet.

This week at work has been a fairly gentle start , as well as helping with the day to day running of the site I’ve had one or two projects too work on too. The first of these is improving communication between Acumen and the users of the site, in certain quarter’s members don’t feel listened to and hearing that Acumen have put me on the case. The second, which you’ll see more of on Monday is an update to the site rules which as they stand are an unwieldy behemoth and an intimidating prospect for anyone to read. The new version which J and the mods have put a lot of effort into is clearer, easier to read and reaffirms Acumen’s commitment to a friendly, inclusive and welcoming site.

There’s a relaxed atmosphere in the office, music plays in the background and banter is thrown around, a white board in the corner gives scores for various challenges involving paper planes, the office Nintendo Wii and an inflatable football. I’m settling in nicely and really enjoying myself. As I type the sun has even come out.

- Nefarious

We’re pleased to welcome one of our Moderators, Nefarious, into our offices in Brighton today to start an internship with us for a few months.

Nefarious will be working on some of the day to day aspects of TSR whilst also getting to grips with some heavy duty project work. Later into July we will be happy to have our second intern join us, Fleur de Lis.

We are keen to let them both see how things operate and we will benefit hugely from having their experience as long term users and moderators available to us. We’ll give you an update on their keepy uppy scores once they have their feet properly under the desk

- J

Back in January of this year we conducted a large survey on The Student Room, we asked what sort of functionality and features users would like to see and we gauged opinion on some of our own ideas. We received around 1200 completed surveys from Guests, members and subscribers.

Around the same time we also did the following:

• Usability testing with students of all ages who don’t use the site
• Usability testing with relatively new site users
• Usability testing with long time site users 
• A Moderator focus group
• A user Focus group session
• Google Analytics for site activity analysis 
• We spoke to our advertisers and partners 
• We consulted with other forum owners/Admins

The output of all this work combined with the ongoing feedback we receive in our About forum enabled us to identify what hasn’t been working so well on the site and put plans together for where we go from here.

There were reoccurring themes with what our users told us they wanted. Customisation and personalisation in particular and matched what users in About have been telling us since the 2007 redesign asking for skins and the ability to have the site how they want it.

Last Wednesday we took the first steps towards this more customisable TSR

We launched content ‘widgets’ that users could opt into showing within a right hand side bar. Now for example, a user can have their Quotes with them all the time should they wish to, or they can have an RSS feed from another website they regularly visit. We plan to develop a nice catalogue of useful widgets.

The next steps with customisation will be full homepage customisation so you can opt to display just what you want and colour themes so you can choose to have the site coloured one of several options. This will be coming in a few months time.

As part of Wednesdays update we also addressed some of the other issues that were highlighted in the usability testing we conducted, so the position of our tabs at the top is now different and more usable some of the section naming have changed also to be me intuitive.

If you’re having problems with the site since these changes, if you’d like to make a suggestion for a new widget use the appropriate threads in the About Forum: http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=5

- J

I’m now more or less mended following my stunt man antics the other week. Thanks for the get well soon thread much appreciated. I still haven’t ventured onto a bike I need to get a new helmet first but i’ll be back on the road in the next few weeks.

Some good meetings in the past week, the first with one of the largest academic university text book publishers, the second was with the Education Editor of Britain’s biggest selling broadsheet paper. Both of these very long standing, respected publishers are looking to make the content they have traditionally put in print as engaging as possible for today’s web savvy students. They are both doing all sorts of cool things for the online student audience but we could help them get more students in front of their resources through The Student Room and Coursework.info. We could help them package their material up in such a way that is sits alongside and promotes the writing of focussed user generated comment which is what TSR is all about. Lots of ideas were discussed some may stick and I’ll keep you posted if chats start getting more focussed.

Guitar hero is the latest out of office hours craze here at TSR HQ. We’ve completed easy level and CN whooped Satan, medium level is proving to be more challenging. Maybe we should have a TSR guitar hero championship, any competitors standing forward?

In the TSR pet thread in About ages ago it was suggested we get a pet here in the office. For the moment we have Quatchi who was kindly given to us by our web developers in Canada. He’s a mascot for the 2010 winter games in Vancouver. Now Quatchi has gone on tour. Super Moderator Fleur de lis has him first off then he will be passed from mod to mod over the next few months on a journey of discovery and excitement…. He might travel overseas, he might see and smell some ghastly things on his travels. Hopefully we’ll be able to show you photographic highlights of ‘Quatchi’s journey in Mod land’ soon.

- J

Those of you who may have read some of the entries from the last week or two might have seen we recently had our moderators meeting weekend in London - partly to say thank you to the mods for the great job they do on the site and partly to discuss the site and where it’s going to go over the next year.

Last year I was lucky to enough to be at the meet as a moderator. I found it a great experience - both from trying out some activities I’d never done before and in getting a better insight in to Acumen and TSR. It would be interesting to see how things played out this year.

The fun started on the Saturday as we all met near the London Eye for a birds-eye-view of London. It was good to meet up with many of the mods who I’d met before and good that there were some new faces there too. It was the first time since getting the job that I would meet most of these people, so I was a little apprehensive as to how it might feel. But the mods are a super bunch and if I’m honest it didn’t feel any different meeting them again.

The views from the top of the London Eye were amazing. Sadly CN decided to chicken out of going up having not liked it too much on a previous visit. He missed out on everyone catching up and several of us ‘landmark’ spotting. But we found him again when we reached the ground and headed off to Canary Wharf for paintballing!

We had Admins and Minis against Globals and Supers. CN was on the Globals and Supers team with a bright yellow vest on, so we could all see him more easily and shoot him. With many bruises and some sore legs I think everyone taking part had a great time. Some might say the Supers and Globals won, but there is no doubt in my eyes that it was the Admins and Minis who came away with the victory.

The evening was spent enjoying Eurovision (can you enjoy it?) at our hotel and as you might have expected and indeed some of you seen, our mods couldn’t keep off TSR for the evening and had a little fun on the site.

It was a great day which I think I can say everyone thoroughly enjoyed - I know I did. And although for some people it was quite a late night, I think we were ready for the hard work the next day. This for me would be where the real differences were. This time I knew all about what would be covered and would even have to lead parts of the discussion - I was very nervous about that!

So Sunday was all spent in the meeting. Thankfully we had the most amazing breakfast - anything you might ever want for breakfast seemed to be available. So it kept my energy levels up throughout the long day. We went through a huge amount of things on the day. It was very productive and brilliant to discuss everything with the mod team face to face. I was able to get a lot out of the day and get some decisions on plans we’ve been working on for a number of weeks. And in the end I didn’t feel all that nervous - hope things came across that way to those present

So the day came to an end and people started to head off for their long journeys home hopefully taking with them a feeling we’d accomplished a lot over the weekend. I’m sure you’ll be seeing many of the things we discussed being introduced on the site soon. It really will be exciting to see how the site will develop and continue to move forward in the coming year.

- RK