In the middle of the voting period for the USG's top officer positions, the USG Senate met last night for its weekly meeting, discussing the Point web portal and plans for food service in Dillon Gym, among other issues.
Point, which underwent a partial redesign last spring, is again a target for improvements, USG webmaster Bruce Halperin '09 and information technology committee chair Phil Stern '09 said.
Though the site conveys basic information, such as event listings and dining hall menus, a series of focus groups found that the site should be reorganized to better communicate important information. Halperin and Stern worked with David Cohen-Tanugi '09 to organize the focus group discussions.
The survey group was "roughly divided between people who barely used [Point] and people who used it quite a bit," Cohen-Tanugi said. Participants also had a varying range of technological knowledge.
Rare visitors to the website said the reason they didn't frequent Point is because the site offers repetitive information, such as train schedules and the weather, which can be found elsewhere on the web. Point's event scheduling is often preempted by features currently available on social networking sites like Facebook.
More frequent users of Point typically said the website was too cluttered."There's too much stuff in the sense that nothing stands out," Cohen-Tanugi said.
To remedy this problem, the IT committee suggested prioritizing certain events over others. Officers' opinions differed, however, on how to determine which events would be classified as more important than others.
USG president Rob Biederman '08 agreed that "there are just too many events" listed on Point. He suggested implementing technology similar to that used on amazon.com. Sites like Amazon track viewers' site behavior individually and develop a history for each of user. They then display products most similar to those already included in each user's viewing history. Biederman said the same strategy could be useful in prioritizing events on Point.
Biederman added, however, that "the motivation behind Point is that we're trying to get information out there about events that are kind of off-the-beaten-path."
USG vice president Josh Weinstein '09 suggested looking at similar websites designed by the University's peer institutions for redesign ideas. The site yalestation.org is "so popular at Yale that there really isn't any other [similar] website," he said.
Officers also continued their discussion on opening a cafe at Dillon Gym. Biederman said that he believes the cafe could become "the most profitable dining location [on campus]." It has low overhead costs and can be run by only one staff member.
Though it is too early to specify an opening date for the cafe, Biederman said that Dining Services is currently developing the menu with USG input. It would include food similar to that offered at health clubs, such as smoothies and granola bars. Students also would be able to charge their purchases to their student accounts or deduct them from dining points.
Biederman alleviated concerns that the health food would be overpriced. He said that Dining Services would charge the lowest prices they could because "most of Dining Services operates at a loss anyway."
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