Helping you learn and grow in your higher ed career – no matter how you do it.
That’s Higher Ed Experts’ motto!
That’s why I spent my time chasing the latest trends, doing research, developing online programs (events, courses) as well as teaching. That’s also the reason why I’ve chosen to invest the main part of Higher Ed Experts promotional budget this year in the 5 High Ed Web regional conferences, more specifically in the 5 keynotes of these conferences.
Next week at High Ed Web New England, Sarah Horton, Web Strategy Project Lead on the Harvard Web Publishing Initiative, will give what looks like a very interesting keynote about disruptive innovation.
She agreed to answer a few questions so we all get a chance to learn a bit more today.
1) For the people who don’t know you through your books or work, can you tell us a bit more about what you do at Harvard University?
Sure! I’ve been working at Harvard since June of last year on a project called the Harvard Web Publishing Initiative, or HWPI. It’s a very interesting and ambitious project to provide a unified web publishing platform and set of services to departments in Central Administration and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The project is a collaboration among three groups: Harvard University Information Technology, or HUIT, Harvard Public Affairs and Communications, or HPAC, and the Institute for Qualitative Social Sciences, or IQSS. (One of the first things I had to work on after arriving at Harvard was becoming fluent in acronyms and abbreviations!)
My position is Web Strategy Project Lead, and I work for the HPAC group. My role is to promote quality standards, bringing University and user experience best practices to the project. I also work with my fellow team leads on the overall strategy for the initiative—what I like to think of as “charting a course for success†for the project.
Before working at Harvard I was at Dartmouth for 16 years, first as an academic technologist and then later as Director of Web Strategy, Design, and Infrastructure. That was also an interesting and challenging project! I had a dual report to the VP of IT and the VP of Communications, and led the Web Services team.
What intrigued me about the Harvard position was the opportunity to do web strategy without also running a service organization. Don’t get me wrong — the Web Services team at Dartmouth is awesome! We did great work and provided great service. But it was very difficult to find time for the “strategy†part of my position. It’s tough to be strategic when you’re worried about more immediate operational concerns, like, “where’s that website you promised me?â€
As it turns out, web strategy is complicated, even without a web shop to run! But complicated is also interesting—like solving a puzzle—and I look forward to sharing how some of the pieces are coming together with colleagues at HighEdWeb.
 2) Your keynote will deal with disruptive innovation. This is often seen as something scary and threatening in higher education. But, can it help higher ed professionals as well?
I’ve only recently started thinking of HWPI as an innovation project, and added in the disruptive part even more recently. From the perspective of someone involved in creating and promoting adoption for HWPI, what’s scary is that in some ways we haven’t given it the consideration due to a disruptive innovation project. We haven’t talked about what makes a successful innovation project, and we haven’t deliberately factored innovation diffusion into our process. That’s not to say the project will fail—it’s actually going quite well! But success is typically measured by how many people use the technology, and I believe we will get more and happier adopters by paying closer attention to the innovation process.
For example, one problem we face is something called “perceived compatibility†in innovation-speak. That’s when people think the new technology is more or less the same as their current technology. It might work a bit differently, there might be a learning curve, but they will be able to do essentially the same things with the new technology as the old—in our case, build websites. Compatibility is good for adoption, but perceived compatibility? Not so good.
I’ve come to appreciate that HWPI is much more than a website building project. We have developed a common information architecture so we can offer site visitors a standard user interface on University sites. The software platform offers really interesting opportunities to share and aggregate information across departments.
But because these features are new and different, they are not universally valued by departments that come to us because they want a new website.
In the end, I think this perceived compatibility may work against adoption because people want HWPI to work the same as whatever they currently use to build their website. And they want their new website to be essentially the same as their current website—just better looking!
So to answer your question more directly, I believe disruptive innovation projects have great value in higher education as long as they are approached as such. Because we work in a technology field, I think we take disruption for granted, and in many cases we expect people to adopt new technologies whether they want to or not. Think of some of the enterprise technology transitions, like email and collaboration tools, that have occurred on many of our campuses.
It’s worth understanding the attributes of innovation, anticipating the challenges, and using the factors that influence adoption to your advantage, particularly in transformation projects where you need people to give up one technology for another, and do things differently.
 3) You’re currently working on a new book about universal design. Why didn’t you choose to talk about this topic instead?
I did consider talking about the topic of my new book, since accessibility and universal design are my favorite things to talk about! But when I reviewed the conference program I thought my web strategy journey would resonate more with the other topics on the program, such as governance, client services, and “cohesive diversity.†And I have made some good discoveries along the way that I think might be useful to colleagues in higher ed.
But, since you brought it up! Let me tell you about my new book.
The working title is Universal Design for Web Accessibility: Solutions for Barrier-Free User Experiences. I’m working with a co-author, Whitney Quesenbery, who’s an expert in usability and accessibility. I’ve learned a great deal working with her.
We started working from the Principles of Universal Design, which are intended to guide designs in a direction that has accessibility built in. For web professionals committed to accessibility as well as great design and usability, a universal design approach to user experience design is very attractive—literally!
For example, my favorite guideline is, “Provide the same means of use for all users: identical whenever possible; equivalent when not.†This translates to providing building access using an accessible main entrance rather than a separate “handicapped†entrance.
On the web, “same means of use†is largely doable—as long as you know what to do! Unfortunately, accessibility is usually addressed at the end of the process (if at all), when it’s too late to do something elegant and attractive. Our book presents a methodology that shows how everyone on a design team can incorporate accessibility, throughout the design process, for a great, usable, and accessible outcome.
This month Whitney and I are putting on the finishing touches—collecting and responding to reviews and gathering up images. We’re getting some really positive feedback from reviewers: “concise but comprehensive,†“genuinely useful,†“right on target,†“fantastic!†At the end of the month we turn it all over to Rosenfeld Media, they work their magic, and come summer we have a book! (And much rejoicing!)
