MyPage: The MyUB Personalization Project

Sample MyUB

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Sample MyPage

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Change MyPage Content

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Change MyPage Layout

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Change MyPage Settings

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Purpose

MyPage allows you to personalize MyUB by giving you the ability to create your own page in MyUB. On your MyPage, you'll have the ability to:

• Add and remove information channels.
• Rearrange the order of appearance of the information channels to your liking.
• Minimize (fold up to just the heading bar) and maximize (show entire channel) information channels.
• Improve the readability of MyUB by changing your font size and removing underlines from hypertext links.
• Turn off the MyUB header when you visit MyUB links.
• Subscribe to personalized channels available only on MyPage (e.g., Web Links, Email Links, VirtualThoughts).
• Set MyPage as your start page of MyUB.

Why this project?

Providing personalization in our campus portal is in line with customer expectations built from usage of commercial portals (MSN, Yahoo), service portals (banks, cell phone companies), and university portals. In a recently published article in Educause Quarterly (Considering User Satisfaction in Designing Web-Based Portals, Indiana University), "users identified personalization and convenience as two highly desirable features" for their university portal.

We have received numerous feedback from students, faculty and staff requesting this functionality. Because MyUB is utilized by all UB community members, with users ranging from largely homogenous (students) to heterogenous (faculty and staff) users of MyUB, and the needs for information vary greatly. There is no institutional way to predict what services and content channels need to be at the user's fingertips. Personalization empowers users to "own" MyUB, to have a piece of "real estate" that they can utilize any way they want (content, order, size, color, display). The only required element is the Need To Know channel.

For more information on using MyPage, try the tutorial.