Application for the 2010
University of California Larry L. Sautter Award
for Innovation in Information Technology
TITLE
UC San Diego’s Blink 2.0 Intranet
CONTACT
Emily Deere, Acting Assistant Vice Chancellor, Administrative Computing and
Telecommunications (ACT)
9500 Gilman Drive
UC San Diego
La Jolla, California 92093
858-822-2916
edeere@ucsd.edu
PROJECT LEADS
 Mojgan Amini, Director Research Applications/ User Experience – technical
direction
 Sydney Donahoe, Director Portal Services – taxonomy and content direction
 Elazar Harel, Former ACT Assistant Vice Chancellor – design direction
 Steve Relyea, Vice Chancellor Business and External Affairs – project sponsor
ADDITIONAL TEAM MEMBERS/ ROLES
Academic Affairs:
 Brett Pollak, content management system
Administrative Computing and Telecommunications:
 Allisa Becker, content migration and taxonomy integration
 Flordelis Dimaano, site architecture and technical implementation
 Erin Farshchi, user experience analysis
 Allan Kim, technical implementation
 Matt Kirkland, layout and user interface design
University Communications and Public Affairs:
 Michele Humphrey, design consultation
ADVISORY GROUP
 Donald Larson, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Controller
 Thomas Leet, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Human Resources
PROJECT SUMMARY
UC San Diego Blink 2.0
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Innovative intranet redesign: UC San Diego first developed a non-passwordprotected intranet, called Blink, in 2000. But the Web has grown by leaps and
bounds since then. By 2009, Blink was long overdue for a massive overhaul of its
design, technical structure, and content. That’s when the Blink Redesign Team
conceptualized “Blink 2.0” and launched a UC San Diego-wide collaboration. We
invite you to tour the resulting Blink 2.0 intranet.
Collaboratively created and maintained: The cross-functional project team
collected input from more than 1,000 UC San Diego faculty and staff through focus
groups, individual interviews, online surveys, and card-sort sessions to make Blink
2.0 a truly user-driven university intranet. See our user-driven process in action.
More than 3,100 pages of content in the site are owned and updated by
approximately 80 Subject Matter Experts who represent nearly 50 units in at least 3
vice chancellor areas.
Impact at UCSD and beyond: Today, Blink 2.0 is attracting an ever-increasing user
base. In March 2010 alone, monthly unique visitors to the site numbered 163,842.
This number is more than triple the size of the UC San Diego staff, demonstrating
the applicability of Blink 2.0 to other UC campuses and universities. In the extremely
tight budget climate in California and worldwide, Blink 2.0, a uniquely open intranet,
serves as a primary source of information, training, tools, and news.
Campus-wide cost savings: On average, Blink is visited by about 12,000 people
per day. Based on our estimates, Blink saves each person about 1 hour a day in
terms of locating campus information and tools vs. departments maintaining separate
websites for their content. Assuming an average hourly rate of $15 per hour, that’s a
cost savings of $3.9 Million per month!
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Blink 2.0 offers UC San Diego faculty and staff an updated look and feel, significant new
features on the home page, dynamic navigation, better content organization, and a new
content management system.
Blink 2.0 Intranet Home Page:

Direct links to business tools: Users access the campus’s most frequently
used tools in one click from the Toolbox on the home page. The tools are filed
into expandable “drawers” called Research, Instruction, Business, and Personal.
Each drawer also contains a link to comprehensive lists of UCSD forms and all
UCSD tools.

MyBlink customization: Users can consolidate their most-often-linked-to URLs
into one of the Toolbox drawers on the Blink 2.0 home page. MyBlink details.

Staff- and faculty-focused news: A large rotating photo image, which users can
also stop from rotating, and a carousel of news items in sets of three keep our
visitors up to date with faculty- and staff-related news items. News display.
UC San Diego Blink 2.0
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
Events calendar widget: This Google-based widget offers an instant view of
several UCSD calendars, including our master Calendar of Events, Registrar
Academic and Administrative Calendar, and Payroll Calendar. See details.

Interactive campus map widget: The Maps widget on the Blink 2.0 home page
features UCSD’s interactive campus map. MapLink application; About MapLink.

Real-time shuttle display widget: The Maps widget also links to UCSD
Shuttles, which displays the campus’s extensive network of buses in real time.
Blink 2.0 Intranet Site-wide Features

Content management system: In spring 2009, under the direction of our
Campus Web Manager, UC San Diego selected the Hannon Hill Cascade Server
product as its official website platform. Hannon Hill offered several essential
features that made it the best choice:
o User-friendly WYSIWYG/HTML editor
o Cascading Style Sheets
o Accessible Web pages
o Multiple university clients, including other UC campuses
o File and image hosting
o Authorized user access to content development and updating
o Easy integration with Web services
o Content easily served out as RSS, PDF, HTML
o Taxonomy-based, dynamic navigation
o More about Hannon Hill
With the Hannon Hill selection, the Blink Redesign Team formed an operational
group charged with migrating the more than 3,000 content pages in Blink to Blink
2.0 as soon as the site’s new layout, design, templates, and content organization
were in place.

Innovative page templates:
o “Drawer” design allows for quick scanning of high-level landing pages,
with each section expandable for drill-down.
o Collapsible sections in how-to pages lets readers go directly to the step
they need.

Enhanced search:
o Blink search features
o Options to search Blink collection only or search all UCSD sites
o Advanced topic searches
o Online student, faculty, and staff directory search

Friendly links:
o Easy-to-remember links to pages

Google Analytics:
o Monthly reports for Blink site usage
o Subject Matter Expert access to Google Analytics
UC San Diego Blink 2.0
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
Single Sign-On access to nearly 100 business applications:
o Single Sign-On details
o Applications list
TIME FRAME 2008-2009
 The Blink Redesign Team was formed in October 2008 and met weekly for more
than a year.
 The Blink 2.0 intranet was launched on September 10, 2009.
 The MyBlink feature for customization was launched in December 2009.
GOALS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
The Blink Redesign Team set out to achieve several specific goals, identified below. The
goals were intended for measurement after one full year of operation of the Blink 2.0
intranet. To meet the application deadline for the Larry L. Sautter award, the Blink
Redesign Team measured achievements after the first six months of implementation.
The objective assessment data indicate that the Blink 2.0 intranet is well on its way to
fully achieving all goals.
1. Goal: Blink 2.0 will be identified as the primary gateway for UCSD faculty
and staff to access tools and information they need at work.
a. The number of daily unique visitors to Blink 2.0 will increase from the
2009 average.
Achievement: Increase in March 2010 of 27.45% unique visitors over
March 2009.
Daily unique visitors March 1-31 2010: 163,842
Daily unique visitors March 1-31 2009; 128,552
b. Content owners believe Blink 2.0 is a valuable place to locate Web
content for faculty and staff, with the number of requests for new content
and significant updates increasing from 2008.
Achievement: Increase of 68% from 2008 to 2009.
Requests in 2009: 461 pages
Requests in 2008: 314 pages
2. Goal: Users will be able to find what they need quickly and easily.
a. Users can access ten of the most-often-used tools in one click from the
home page.
Achievement: Users can access more than 50 of UC San Diego’s most
popular applications in one click from the Blink 2.0 home page Toolbox.
b. Users can access ten of the most popular pages in one click from the
home page.
Achievement: Users can get to the top ten pages, as measured by
Google Analytics, from the “Most popular pages” section of the Blink 2.0
home page Blink Updates box. The pages listed in this box are updated
weekly.
c. Blink 2.0 will be customizable and personalized.
Achievement: The Blink 2.0 home page Toolbox includes a MyBlink
UC San Diego Blink 2.0
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feature that allows users to select up to 9 links that appear on their Blink
home pages.
d. Blink 2.0 search will work effectively.
 Users can limit or expand search parameters.
Achievement: Users can choose to search Blink only (default)
or All UCSD sites (selection) from header of home page and
all sub-pages of Blink 2.0
 Blink provides key matches in search results.
Achievement: Blink 2.0 administrators create key matches for
pages that do not appear high in a list of search results for
specific terms.
3. Goal: After the first full year of implementation, customer satisfaction
survey results will increase from 3.7 in 2008 to 3.8 for academic staff, and
from 3.6 in 2008 to 3.9 for administrative staff.
Achievement: After the first 6 months of operation, the UC San Diego Customer
Satisfaction Survey yielded the following mean scores for Blink 2.0 Intranet,
indicating an upward trend:
 Academic staff mean score: 3.8
 Administrative staff mean score: 3.8
4. Goal: Blink 2.0 will represent a best-of-breed and peer-competitive intranet
for higher education.
a. Blink 2.0 will offer 80% of the features recommended as best practices by
the Nielsen/ Norman Group.
Achievement: The Blink 2.0 intranet offers 80% of Jakob Nielsen’s
recommended features below:
 Mobile version of the intranet
 Internal marketing strategies to prepare users for change
 Emergency preparedness measures
 Reliance on page templates to ensure consistent user
interfaces
 Firming up the editorial workflow to ensure content quality:
Each page has a named content owner, all significant content
updates go through an editorial process.
 Many interesting presentations of news streams on the
homepage, e.g., rotating news feature, carousel teaser
feature, RSS feed
 Role-based personalization to focus users on the content and
apps most useful to their jobs, e.g., Single Sign-On.
 Customization that lets users adapt the UI on their
ownblink.ucsd.edu/technology/security/SSO/
 Focus on improving search, including interesting approaches
to advanced search
 People search remains an extremely popular feature
 Extensive use of usability methods
 Promising measures of increased usage and employee
satisfaction, e.g., increased site usage statistics and increase
UC San Diego Blink 2.0
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on Customer Satisfaction Survey, both explained in earlier
sections.
 Social networking component
 Boss blogs that show a personal side
 Ongoing improvement in frequent use of SharePoint and
similar technologies
b. Other universities and UC campuses will use Blink as a model for their
own intranets.
Achievement: Too early to measure, although several UC campuses are
using the Hannon Hill Content Management System and others have
inquired about the CSS coding used for Blink 2.0 intranet templates.
UC San Diego Blink 2.0
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