FAQ

I'd like to be informed about future developments to the map

Announcements about the map will be made to the ucam-webmasters@lists.cam.ac.uk mailing list. Feel free to subscribe to this low-volume list.

What sort of feedback are you looking for on this 'beta' release?

We're interested in at least bugs, 'didn't do what I expected's, usability issues (though many are going to be intractable), suggestions, and reports of factual errors. All to the UCS Service Desk service-desk@ucs.cam.ac.uk or on-line to http://issues.map.cam.ac.uk/ please.

Why does the map display so badly on mobile phones?

The feasibility study that developed the map as it appears at the moment only included developing a desktop version. We know how we want to do a mobile version and we've made provision for this. One of the things we know we need to do before a full launch is complete this work. See Mobile Mockup for an early version of how we envisage this working (though our current plans have evolved somewhat from this).

Why is the page styling non-standard?

The University is in the middle of developing new guidelines for presenting information on the web that will unify the approach to desktop and mobile devices ('Project Light'). These guidelines will be published in August 2012 and the map will be updated to match them as soon as possible thereafter. In the meantime we haven't expended much effort on the details of how the pages appear. This does mean that the appearance may change, perhaps radically, sometime in the future.

Why isn't <insert department name> marked on the map, only its buildings?

Our current approach is to only mark physical buildings on the map itself, and to leave the association between buildings (and their locations) and University departments, etc, to the map presentation system. While there are many cases where it might make sense to put department names on the map itself, there are also lots of cases where it wouldn't (for example, many University buildings are occupied by multiple departments and other University institutions).

This is however a difficult judgement call, and feedback as to what you'd expect would be valuable. This is an issue that we may revisit in the future.

If you want to know who occupies a particular building, just click there on the map and you should get a list of who is nearby.