Observations
Hello everybody, my name is Rack Hyu, the new intern from Korea. I will be writing my learnings, feelings, suggestions and a lot of other things through this blog from now on. Today, I would like to write some of my observations I have made surfing around T/MC related blogs and sites during the past couple of days.
Before actually working here, I didn’t really know what kind of work I would be doing here. I was just told that this place was a non-profit organization giving education to kids who are having a hard time affording it. Therefore, I thought I was going to do some tutoring work or work similar to that.
At the first day of the internship, I was told to surf around the blogs and sites related to Tutor Mentor Connection and learn what this is all about. What I found out is that, one of the main job T/MC does is that they provide information to people which part of Chicago (or other places) has a lot of poverty and need support by a map. They inform this to get volunteers and donors to support in those areas. The people who are willing to volunteer could also use the information to discover which places are needed for support.
While surfing through the T/MC sites, I made up some suggestions that I thought it would be better fixed. The suggestions are listed below.
1) There are a lot of contents built by volunteers and interns inside the T/MC site. Although some contents are easy to access, some contents are very hard to get and some useful contents have no link at all or hard to find the links. The map gallery for example (
http://www.horizonmapping.net/projects/tmc/tmc_gallery/Tutor_Mentor...) has a lot of map information. There is also an interactive map built in, but at the first glance of the gallery, it is hard to know whether there is an interactive map or not. (You have to follow the path : map gallery -> Navigate to a specific map -> Interactive ; to reach the interactive map) The fact that there is an interactive map should be informed, (since I think is quite important) and the link should be easy to reach otherwise first time users won’t be able to use this content.
2) A lot of information are distributed, and are needed to be integrated. There are three official sites (that I think they are official), and need a lot of navigation to find information. Here are the three sites.
http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/
http://www.cabriniconnections.net/
http://www.tutormentorconnection.org/
The problem is, there are information that one site of the site has, and the other site doesn’t have. Therefore it takes more time to gather information then necessary, and this will be uncomfortable for users that won’t like spending a lot of time.
There are a few more suggestions to talk about but because of the time, I will continue writing tomorrow.