Simplifying permissions

If you've ever had to configure permissions for other administrators, you'll know there are a lot to choose from. Some of them make more sense than others. If you're not already familiar with permissions, now might be a good time to stop reading—it's going to get a bit intense.

The problem: too many permissions
Currently, for most “things” (e.g. news, links, FAQs), we have 3 levels of permissions: view, edit and delete. And you can grant each of these permissions individually. So you can do clever things, like say that an admin can delete links, but they can't view or edit them. Insert maniacal laugh here.

Taking links as an example, of the 8 possible combinations of view/edit/delete, only 2 really make sense. They are:
  1. you can only view links
  2. you can do anything with links—view, edit and delete them
For most “things”, even students are allowed to view them, so it doesn't really make sense to say that an admin would have less permissions than a student. So that leaves us with one permission that makes sense: “do anything” with links, and 2 possibilities: you either have it or you don't.

How we're going to fix this problem
Starting with news and links, we're going to condense the permissions for each resource down to just 1, “edit”—which means “do anything” with this resource. So, Link.Edit or News.Edit. If you don't have, say, News.Edit, you can still see news in admin (and in the student console), but you can't write, edit or delete news. If you do have that permission, you can do anything related to news. 

We'll be fixing permissions for FAQs and Info Sheets (a.k.a. documents) too over the coming months.

Links

Building on the recent improvements to news, we're about to do a similar thing with links. 

You probably know links as websites. We are now reverting back to calling them links—partly to avoid confusion with work group sites and content sites, and partly to emphasise that these can be links to pages rather than “websites”. A website like www.nytimes.com is different to a link to a specific page on that website. In most cases, a link to a specific page will help students get straight to the information they need.

Here's a preview of what will change on the admin form:

Before_after

As with news, all categories will collapse into topics. All the existing categories for links will be converted to topics for you automatically.

Unlike news, there are no drafts with links—they’ll become visible to students as soon as you add them. That makes it easier to add links quickly, and drafts are unnecessary for links, which don't require the same care and attention that goes into news.

We've also done away with pre-publication and expiry dates for links. Removing expiry dates was controversial with news, and we've gone even further this time—so this time I'll go into a bit more detail about these decisions.

No expiry date: as with news, recent links will be more prominent to students than older ones, so they're more likely to be clicked on. Older links might be just as useful 5 years after they were added—I know this one is, to me.

Another reason: as an admin, having to decide when a link will expire when you're adding it is asking too much, and it diverts concentration away from the task of adding the link. Using myself as the usability sample group, I imagine my thought process going something like this:
  1. That's a great article on interview tips! I want to add a link to that.
  2. Admin > Links > add a link
  3. Title: easy.
    URL: paste that in.
    Expire:.... uh.... should I check when was it written? It seemed pretty timeless advice. But it won't be as relevant when robots have taken over all our jobs. So that will probably be, like... uh... the year 2050? Close enough. Oh wait, I have to predict not just the year, but the exact date?! I'd better do some research on Wikipedia...
At this point my imaginary task has been forgotten, perhaps forever, as I try to predict the exact moment of singularity. It's an exaggerated example, but I hope you get the idea.

It was a similar decision for future publication dates—they're gone too. In this case though, we can see that only 0.5% of links are set to be published at a later date*, so hopefully this isn't as contentious for links as it was for news.

Overlap between info sheets and links
Currently, you can add info sheets (sometimes known as articles, tips, fact sheets, resources or some variation on these) which are either uploaded documents or links. So there's an overlap between info sheets and links, and it would be easy to get see info sheets as a sort of sub-category of links, which they're not.

We'll be clearing up this ambiguity with this update. You might find some of your info sheets have been converted to links (they'll be put into an “info sheet” topic for you), and it will no longer be possible to add an info sheet which is just a link—you'd just add a link instead.

* Based on links added in the last year, across 46 CareerHub websites. Only 6 of 1066 were published after they were added.

Getting on Topic

As you know we started rollout of the new and improved News and Links sections in CareerHub. We don't often decide to re-invent things just for fun (sometimes we do), but in this case obviously we want to start the process of moving the Resources sections in CareerHub into a new direction.

Background

One driving force behind this is because we're in the process of redesigning the student interface. While looking at really good ideas to make CareerHub work better for students, we have identified a few changes that we need to the core structure of the data in the resources area. And, as one thing always leads to another, we are taking the opportunity to make things work better all round.

What needs improving?

Currently everything in the student interface is organised for them firstly by the resources 'type' (News, FAQs, Info Sheets, Websites) then by a series of categories including a resource specific category then Service, Discipline and finally Campus.

Not only is it a lot of work to add these items with all the categories , but it is also a lot of work for students to find them.

Consider this situation:

I am a student looking for information and help on 'resume writing'. Currently I would need to look to see if there are any News items then.. find the appropriate category (or closest one) that I expect I might find resume writing help in and then after I get a perhaps somewhat relevant list of News  items I need to read them. 

I might get frustrated because I didn't find anything and decide to just Google it. Or if I am persistent then I could now do the exact process above for FAQ's, Info Sheets and Websites. 

This seems a bit tedious when all the student wanted was anything you had to help me with Resume Writing

Making it better

So if we think about this process, the motivation for the student is to find help on the topic of 'resume writing'. It doesn't really matter what type of resource it is so long as it helps with the topic.

So... to make it better we can remove the layer in front of them where they have to choose a resource type first, and just let them look for 'topics'. We don't need to ask them to look at resource names such as 'websites, info sheets etc. 

The resource 'type' is really an admin function because you need to navigate to add different types of resources because they each have different processes for adding them. 

How do 'topics work' 

By now most of will probably be familiar with the concept of 'labelling' in CareerHub or even in your Gmail account,  or 'tagging' in Facebook. 'Topics' are similar,  it is a free form tool where within a few words you can summarise what the resource you are adding is about. Of course you can add multiple 'topics' to any resource if it is useful to to this. Unlike 'labels',  'topics' are visible to students.

In our observations most resources are suitable for any student. So they are literally categorised under all Discipline, Service and Campus categories too. In the upcoming model you only need to add topics where appropriate, so you may add 'resume writing' and 'science' as topics to a resource. 

If a science student looks under the 'science' topic they will find all resources you have directly related to 'science' including the 'resume writing'. If they look under 'resume writing' they will find all the help you have on this topic + the specific one you have which also has a topic of 'science'

If they search 'resume writing for science students' they will get the specific resource at the top of their results. 

Other advantages

By changing to this model we no longer need to think about everything in terms of Service, Discipline and Campus. 

This model has served us well in the past but... times change and so do expectations and needs. Once we transition all the resources away form the current restrictions of categories we are then free to re-think how job searching and categorisations work and make some improvement in that area. 

For all UK universities, and an increasing number of Australian and New Zealand universities, we now have the benefit of direct student system synchronisation. This means we can move forward to target jobs directly to students based on this what they are known to be studying rather than a summarised listing of Disciplines. There are also other advantages that this method will bring - but more about this later ;)

As always if you want to find out more ask on the CareerHub LinkedIn group or send as an email or call.

Dee

 

Re-making headlines

For the last 2 months, we've been working on a cleaner, simpler admin interface for news.

You can expect to see these changes in the coming weeks—but for now, here's a preview:

Before_after

Previously, there were 17 or 18 different things—or even more, depending on how you count them—that you had to fill out in order to put some news up on your website. We've managed to get that down to just 3 things, with 1 optional extra.

As you can see, writing news won't feel so much like a lengthy interrogation any more, and you'll be able to concentrate on the most important part—the news itself.

For news, all the different categories and labels are replaced by a new concept: topics. Over the coming months, topics will become the most important organisational tool for all resources—resources being news, frequently-asked questions, links, articles. And 2 new types of resources—which we're not quite ready to reveal, but I think you'll find them really useful. 

I'm very excited about the re-made news interface, and looking forward to applying the same principles of simplification to the other resources too. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Please feel free to leave a comment here on the blog, or email our support crew.

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CareerHub Support

CareerHub is a web application used by educational institutions to run their careers services.

This blog covers news and announcements related to CareerHub.

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