OR/MS Today - December 1999

December 1999

Putting on a New Face

By Michael A. Trick

I am often struck by the differing speeds at which progress at INFORMS Online seems to occur. Sometimes we go for months only updating existing pages and enhancing our current offerings. These months are valuable and necessary, but seem a bit unsatisfying: IOL exists to continually increase the world's knowledge of operations research and the management sciences. Incremental improvements pale relative to wholesale changes. But, some weeks offer bigger changes: recently three important changes occurred within days of each other.

The first change is the most obvious: INFORMS Online has changed the design of its front page. From its beginning four-and-a-half years ago, IOL has had a consistent look on its first page: the pages at IOL were divided into roughly 10 categories and all the offerings of IOL were listed under one of these major areas. This system worked well at the beginning. Users were able to quickly find relevant pages directly from the front page.

Over time, however, this approach proved unwieldy, ironically due to the success of INFORMS in generating useful online information. Not just IOL, but many INFORMS committees and groups started to create extensive pages. The front page of IOL grew, and grew and grew, and became so long that it was no longer possible to find pages of interest without reading through long lists.

For me, this is not a problem: I am on IOL every day, and I have a pretty good knowledge of where everything is. But through the eyes of a new user (we get about 8,000 every week), it was clear that our front page was not working. It was too busy and too wordy.

I created a couple of possible new front pages, each severely (but constructively!) criticized by my editorial team before we finally worked out the current version of IOL. If you haven't seen it yet, please check out http://www.informs.org.

Rather than a list of approximately 80 subpages, IOL now has three major areas: the left hand column lists 10 or so most popular pages. An analysis of usage patterns suggests that around 90 percent of our returning visits are to see one of the top-10 pages.

To access the remaining pages, a user has two alternatives: first she can access "category pages," which divide IOL into one of 10 categories. IOL has had these categories for a long time, but now they become primary access points to IOL. We use a simple javascript routine to provide a small pop-up description of each category so users, particularly first time users, will know what the category is about.

The second method of access for the user is to use a drop-down menu on the main page that consists of the 80 pages that were previously available on the main page. This approach is quicker for the experienced user but is neatly hidden for the first-time user. Overall, the page is cleaner, smaller and much easier to use. And with the additional screen space we can better identify important or timely information.

This is not the end of the story. We are currently working at putting together front pages for specialized customers (students, practitioners and so on) and the page will continue to evolve as IOL changes and we better understand the needs of our visitors.

The second change for IOL during this week was the addition of a discussion board. I hesitated adding such a system to the public parts of IOL, however, because for the first years of IOL, I felt our primary purpose was to highlight and recognize the activities of INFORMS. As we have met that goal I have been convinced that it would be useful for IOL to become a "destination" for those interested in OR/MS more broadly. To this end, IOL has begun to add services that will make IOL the first stop, and perhaps the only stop, for those interested in OR/MS. The discussion board is a start.

The final change for IOL is the least obvious. In fact, its success will be measured by how little it is noticed. For this, we need a bit of history. Before IOL there was a system put together by Jim Bean and Mohan Sodhi at the University of Michigan to provide information for INFORMS using a system called GOPHER, a predecessor of the World Wide Web. This evolved into an early Web system that became INFORMS Online.

For the first years of our existence, this machine was invaluable. We got excellent Internet connectivity and wonderful software support at an unbeatable price: free! But such a situation could not last forever; IOL with its 20,000 pages and 125,000 hits per week is now a significant load for any server. The needs of INFORMS for machine names, e-mail addresses and much more made it unreasonable to continue the way we had.

Moving to a new server was obviously difficult. It was even more difficult once we decided to move away from the Sun server and operating system at the University of Michigan to an Intel chip and Linux operating system more suitable for the INFORMS office. I immediately decided to deputize this (literally!) to Brian Borchers, IOL's deputy editor. Brian has spent a tremendous amount of time building IOL on a new machine. Brian has been working with Matt Saltzman (INFORMS VP/Information Technology) and Randy Kiefer (INFORMS director of Information Technology) to create a parallel IOL.

If all of IOL were simply HTML pages, this would be a relatively simple matter. The heart of IOL, however, is the collection of scripts that do everything from adding a new job to the Professional Opportunities page to generating the pages for a national meeting. All of these scripts had to be checked for Sun-specific aspects and many were updated for Linux.

If all goes according to plan, sometime before the end of the year IOL will have changed from one machine and one operating system to another machine a thousand miles away on a completely different system. And, if we are lucky and have thought out the problems, no one will notice!

Michael Trick is a professor at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, and editor of INFORMS Online. He can be reached at trick@cmu.edu

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