7 Mar 2009

Warwick blogs case study

This a case study of the successful launch of Warwick blogs.

The University of Warwick provides facilities, known as Warwick blogs for all students and staff to set up and publish their own blog. I may be mistaken but as far as I know, the University of Warwick is the only University in the UK that provides such facilities to both students and staff alike. The system was developed by the e-lab, IT Services in the University. They were interested to see how students blog and what they blog about.

This is an amazing initiative and they are also encouraging staff to use it for e-learning purposes. However, I am not really sure how successful that has been as I am not aware of even one lecturer who blogs in the entire Warwick Business School.

Before the service was launched, they carried out focus group studies in February 2004. This was followed by usability studies to ensure that the system was easy to use. They used something called Paper prototype testing, whereby design sketches were used to develop a prototype and evaluated in March 2004. I feel that they got it right as the interface is really user friendly and setting up a blog only takes a couple of minutes.



They finally launched the service accompanied with a publicity campaign using various formats ranging from posters to web banners.

When I last checked there were 5900 blogs with 119095 entries on topics ranging from principles of flight to the Ikea effect.

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