Wow did you see we hit 1.2M users yesterday? Super exciting. We have been revamping the MVA site quietly over the last few months - although after hitting our 13th release in 7 months it doesn't feel so quiet for team MVA.
This past week you may have noticed some "louder" substantial changes on the MVA home page. I wanted explain why we made these changes, and also request your feedback on them.
A key theme of this new release was to change the discoverability on the site: we wanted to help MVA customers get to the courses and topics they care about in a much easier way. Let us know, were we successful?
Key goals in this new release were:
Get to the content you want in a single click on the home page:
- I think we almost got there with our new “hover click” UI although I still see room for improvement
- This new UI lets you see immediately top courses by subject or help you get to new topic pages
- Improve our top-level navigation menus to help you access courses by topic anywhere on the site
Offer new Topic Pages that group courses by subjects like HTML5 or products like Windows Server and help you:
- Find courses in topic areas you care about, and build your own personal learning plans around them
- Discover additional resources like books or software evaluations to supplement your education
- Help suggest ways to explore how to take the next steps in your career with Microsoft Certifications
Make it easier to find our popular Live Events like MVA Jump Starts and Live Q&As
- New countdown tiles on the home page to help find our ever growing choice of live events and remind you when they are happening (several times every week)
- An improved Live Events link in our updated top level menu to find it anywhere on the site and see Live Events grouped by themes on our event page
- And we made the Live Event registration experience easier and more integrated for MVA members: you no longer need to juggle two separate registration IDs and Passwords, just use your MVA member ID and password. For existing customers, we help you join these on your first log-in to register for a live event.
Give MVA customers a place on the home page to be heard with MVA Voices: a place we share all the great feedback MVA members send us through our Tell the Dean alias, and via our Live Event forums.
Do a better job of making it easier to understand what MVA is and our philosophy to new visitors with a new What is MVA? section.
So as you can see, it was a jam packed sprint for us this month. Heck we even updated our favicon: we affectionately call it "Frank" :)
Please let us know what you think of these changes, what you like, and more important what you don’t like or still think is missing.
Share with us here on the MVA blog, on Facebook, Twitter, or send mail to our Tell the Dean alias which you can access on the lower right hand corner of every page on MVA.
Successful technologists never stop learning and great technology never stops evolving. Our commitment is to keep evolving MVA to be the most exciting place for expert-led technology training.
Thanks for learning with us and keep the feedback coming!