Working with the University to improve vision and planning

The PSU online Portfolio is designed to serve as a focus for discussion, analysis, and reflection among faculty, staff, students, and community members. In addition, the portfolio includes a section on vision and planning, and a template for PSU’s reaccreditation self-study report, which was completed in 2005..

Opportunity:

The Office of Institutional Research and Planning (OIRP) at PSU is responsible for, among other things, conducting research on special topics and complying with state and federally-mandated reporting requirements. In order to meet their objectives, they needed to develop an online portfolio – one that could both serve as a connection point for the university community, but also as an outreach tool to the larger city. It also needed to double as the self-study report required for University accreditation requirements.

Approach:

We worked closely with the web developer and designer, as well as the Director of OIRP and its researchers and interns to help create Portland State University’s first online portfolio. 

Stakeholder Interviews

Over thirty faculty, staff, community members and other stakeholders needed to be interviewed to understand both how the stakeholders would use the site for and what information should be highlighted to meet the institution’s objectives. Interview questions were designed to uncover the myriad of activities PSU engaged in and to understand how various efforts intersected and supported PSU’s mission to “let knowledge serve the city”. Once all interviews were complete, we synthesized the findings into major themes and implications, which would later begin to serve as a foundation for the architecture of the site.

Information Architecture

From the interviews with the stakeholders, an overall structure for the site began to emerge around five key themes, as well as an accreditation self-study section. The site also needed to allow for springboard discovery of PSU departments and special programs.

Content Development

Once the basic architecture of the site was completed, we were able to complete the rest of the content development, taking the results of the stakeholder interviews and finding a consistent voice and tone for the overall site, eventually leading to the content development for over a hundred pages.

Solution:

The final online Portfolio was designed around five major themes, totaled over a hundred pages and helped PSU in its goal of self-study, reflection and community outreach. It was programmed in an open source language that uses wikis to enable the OIRP staff and other PSU stakeholders to continue to update the site so that it could be a living document. It was used to help meet PSU’s accreditation requirements in 2005.