Future Endeavour

HighEdWeb Great Keynote Revolt of 2009 - Analysis

2009-10-12T08:24:00.000-07:00

I've decided to do a bit of analysis of the backchannel during the 2nd HighEdWeb Keynote, in order to provide a little better understanding of what went on. Dave Ferguson has already done a bit of this.

First of all, in the hour from 11:59 to 12:59 (the keynote ended around 12:51) there were 536 tweets with the #heweb09 hashtag according to What the Hashtag. Of those, I counted 488 (91%) that were related to the keynote or the discussion of the keynote.

There were, according to my count, 155 retweets, 140 of which were about the keynote.

Virtually all tweets after 12:20 were about the keynote, and the peak of tweeting came at 12:43 with 22 tweets.

The "Snark" Factor

One thing I wanted to look at was the nature of the tweets during the keynote - were they positive, negative, respectful, disrespectful, etc.

In looking through the data, I didn't find a single tweet that could clearly be classed as possitive toward the presenter, so I was forced to skip that evaluation.

Then I went through and assigned a subjective 'snark' score to each tweet, where 1 = factual tweet with no sarcasm or criticism, and 5 = completely sarcastic/critical tweet, bordering on personally disrespectful. Here are a few examples:

1: Galper: "e-mail from a trusted source is the best way to communicate with students" #heweb09
2: How old is this presentation! #heweb09
3: I think it's safe to say David Galper won't be checking Twitter #heweb09
4: We need a drinking game for everytime he says "actually" and "actionable". #heweb09
5:OMG ICQ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #heweb09 i heard its still big in uzbekistan

Acknowledging that the scale is subjective, I assigned a 'snark' value to all 488 keynote related tweets. The chart below shows the average 'snark' score for all tweets during each minute of the keynote.

The second chart shows the number of tweets each minute by 'snark' score, where 5 equals the most critical and sarcastic tweets.

Note how the 'snark' factor rapidly rises after about 12:15, indicating that the speaker got nearly a third of the way through his presentation before the audience turned on him.

This paints a somewhat different picture than some of the commentators who weren't there indicate. Some have suggested that the Heweb09 audience was out for blood, but this analysis suggests that they actually waited until 15 minutes before turning on the presenter.

By that point, the audience had already been subjected to two extremely loud and confusing (irrelevant?) videos, a plug for a company no longer in existence, and a lot of talk about outdated technologies. Rereading the tweets, and having been at the keynote, it's possible that what might have finally sent the audience over the edge was a particularly egregious slide that was packed with dense paragraphs of texts. Or it could have just been the aggregate weight of how out of touch this speaker was with his audience and how out of date he was with his materials.

Regardless, after 12:15, the tweets began to get more and more critical and sarcastic:

12:17 - Best keynote EVER #sarcasm #heweb09
12:17 - Are you serious right now? I feel like an alternate universe. #heweb09
12:19 - David Galper, ur doin gr8, and ima let you finish, but @jmspool had one of the best keynotes ever! #heweb09
12:25 - Would he like the immediate feedback of us all walking out? #heweb09
12:25 - *insert ROLFcopter here* #heweb09

And by 12:28, someone suggested, "Can someone live-Kanye this guy? @fienen? #heweb09", effectively recommending that someone tell the speaker to shut up.

Takeaways from the Great Keynote Revolt of 2009

2009-10-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

By now, the HighEdWeb "Great Keynote Revolt of 2009" has been commented on by a number of writers, including Dave Ferguson (and here), Denise Graveline, Silicon Beach Training, Michael Fienen, and several others. I'm not going to go into the keynote directly, even though I was there. If you want background, read these posts or the transcript (beginning at 11:59AM).

I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about the keynote as a social experience.

Soon after the keynote began, @stomer commented:

conspiracy theory about the keynote: it's a test of the power of the back channel; social experiment. #heweb09

And what a social experiment it was. We were there as an audience, to participate by listening attentively to the presenter. But since the presenter failed to engage us, we turned our attention to the backchannel and began to partcipate with each other. But what we were participating in was not what the speaker was intentionally sharing.

The strange thing about that keynote was that it was the high point of the conference for everyone who experienced the backchannel. Not only that, it was a shared experience that bonded us together. I think that we all felt closer to each other by sharing that experience, by sharing our reactions with each other during the keynote, and by being able to share our thoughts and feelings with each other afterward.

It set the tone for the party that happened that night, and I know that we had a higher energy and a closer bond than we would have without that keynote. We all talked about it over and over that night, and it became a shared inside joke that anyone in the conference could refer to and that everyone would immediately understand.

The bottom line was that this was an intense shared experience that brought all of the attendees closer together, not entirely different from the way that survivors of a shared tragedy are often bonded.

Regardless of how I may feel for David Galper, I think that for the conference and for the conference attendees, this was an almost universally positive experience. Where before that keynote we were 450 mostly strangers, after it we all had something we had in common that we could connect on. I met and spoke to more new people in the day after that keynote than I had in the two days prior to it.

In the end, no one will remember my talk on redesigns three years from now, but everyone will remember the "Great Keynote Revolt of 2009". And they will remember it in a very positive way... in the way of how 450 mostly strangers came together in the backchannel to learn that they held common views and feelings and were able to share them with each other. It joined us and humanized us to each other in a way little else could have. In the end, regardless of any of the other presentations, this will probably be remembered as the best HighEdWeb conference ever.

You may be horrified that we would take that away at the cost of that poor man's ego, but I doubt many people there feel that way. If he was ridiculed, it was because he was in no way prepared to present to this audience.

The big takeaway of all of this for me is this: to make an event like this a true success, you have to find a way to bond people together in the experience of that event - to make that event a milestone in their lives. David Galper did that better than anyone I have ever met. It's only unfortunate that he did it unintentionally.

Voices That Matter Web Design Conference - Part 3

2009-05-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

Thursday

Breakfast with the Authors
The last day of the conference started off with a breakfast with the authors. I chose to have breakfast with Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think. Jared Spool also joined us. Having a one-on-one conversations with minds like this was worth the cost of the entire conference. Seriously. These guys know their stuff.

Steve noted that a thousand universities have prototyped every possible design and site organization for us. If we want to see what works, we should do usability testing on their sites. And in fact, that's exactly our plan. :)

Jared Spool was pretty adamant in his assertion that all redesigns are a mistake and a failure... not overly helpful considering that we're in the middle of ours. His recommendation is to only do bits and pieces at a time, and effectively that's what we're doing, since we're only tackling our top level pages.

He also asserted that people never WANT to search. If your site is properly organized, people will always browse before searching. I don't buy that, personally, but hey, it was a great breakfast anyway.

Keynote: Cooking Up Gourmet User Experiences on a Fast Food Budget - Jared Spool
Fascinating and entertaining presentation by Jared Spool, partly about Julia Child, the absurdities of the TSA, and the fact that every university web site has photos of smiling girls under trees.

Actually, his talk was more about a usability approach using cheap tricks rather than expensive methodologies. His point was that knowing a few good tricks is generally just as good (if not better) than developing an extensive methodology. A plumber uses a wrench as a hammer and gets the job done instead of spending money on a special tool just for that job.

Very thought provoking presentation.

Take-aways: Good enough is good enough. "Organizations that are risk adverse produce crap." Learn from others and adapt; there's no need for expensive tools when a few well-honed tricks will do the job.

Learning to Love Tension, Disruption and Chaos - Russ Unger, Carolyn Chandler
This wasn't really the presentation I was hoping it would be. I was hoping that it would be more about tension, disruption and chaos in the redesign process, but it seemed a bit more scattered. I guess I just didn't connect to this session.

Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? - Susan Weinschenk
OK, this presentation blew my mind. Susan talked about people react to pages from a neurological perspective. Tons of fascinating information. User testing has shown that no matter how items on a page are organized, users will click the first items more than all others simply because it is first.

Stories connect with people more than anything else, because they create empathy, and stories with pictures are even more powerful. For us, that means that we're on the right track with having stories on our main landing pages. Cool.

Fear of loss is a powerful motivator, which is why we react to "Only a few left! Order now!" Overall, food, sex and fear are our three biggest neurological motivators. Taking advantage of those is a positive on any site (where appropriate).

I got more new information out of this session than any other.

Take-aways: There is a whole different way to think about - and affect - the user experience based on our innate reactions to things. We react to things at a very primitive and visceral level, and understanding that can be to our advantage in building the user experience.

Here's a link to Susan's blog.

Summary

After a slow start, this conference really took off, and I started to see why people were so excited about it. When I left, my brain was full. I had a great time and brought a lot of useful information back to our campus.

Though I doubt that I'll be able to go back next year, I'm hooked. This is certainly one of the best web user experience conferences out there, and well worth the price of admission.

Voices That Matter Web Design Conference - Part 2

2009-05-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Days two and three were full of great presentations. The interesting about this conference was that the sum of all the sessions taken as a whole was much greater than the individual sessions. I went from being disappointed on Tuesday to overwhelmed on Thursday.

Wednesday

Keynote: The Designful Company: Marty Neumeier
I'm not a designer, so this session wasn't really directed at me, but this was a fascinating discussion of design as more than graphic design and branding. Design is an entire approach to everything from the way a company is run to the way decisions are made to the end user experience.

One Twitter comment was pretty much to the point on this: "right now 'design' sounds like magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on anything to make it better". You could almost substitute "project management" or "planning" for "design" and make the same points.

However, the designers I talked to thought this was a highly inspiring session.

Content Strategy, UX and the Real World - Kristina Halvorson
For me, this was the single best session of the conference. The main reason I loved this session was that it validated all that I'm going through with trying to wrap my head around dealing with the complexities of getting content for our new home page redesign.

Getting content for a site isn't as simple as creating a box on a flow chart saying "content comes in here". Content drives information architecture and information architecture drives content. Content is an iterative process, involving all team members and stakeholders.

The only way you'll succeed in getting the best content is to plan a content strategy around specific goals that you want to achieve.

Plan
Create
Publish
Govern (rinse, wash, repeat)

She provided some great examples about how less content is more: more focused, more maintainable, more on message.

However, she also made the point that taking a content inventory was critical to success. Ugh, that's a hell of a lot of work - mind numbing but necessary.

Take-aways: Content is a process, not a feature. A content strategy will help you avoid the pitfalls of delayed content, scattered, off-message content, etc. We need a clear content strategy statement to help us manage the content for our redesign.

What I Have Learned So Far in the 21st Century - Steve Krug
Steve Krug is the author of the single best web usability book out there: Don't Make me Think. This was a fun presentation. Steve's a great guy. Overall, Steve says that he hasn't really learned a lot about usability in the 12st century that he didn't already know, but there were a few nuggets.

If people need to see something, don't be afraid to shout (make it really stand out)
Fix the top 3 worst usability problems on a site first, before tackling any 'low hanging fruit' problems
Make the smallest change that fixes the problem - don't redesign a page just to fix one issue
http://usertesting.com, http://clicktale.com, http://silverback.com are good tools for online user testing

Beyond Web 2.0 - Jesse James Garrett
Another heavy hitter, Jess James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience, takes on Web 2.0. Actually, he pretty much dismisses Web 2.0 and focuses on the user experience instead. "The experience is the product." The main focus of his presentation is to continually simplify the user's experience. Examples of MS Word with all the tool bars open and a video Microsoft made about Microsoft redesigning the iPod packaging (hilarious!)

Take-aways: The user experience cannot be too simple or too easy. Simplify! Simplify!

Stump the Chump - Steve Krug
Steve Krug took questions from the audience about usability. Unfortunately - or actually fortunately - the first five names he picked were people from Berkeley!

Take-aways: University sites are fundamentally different from other sites. Audience segmentation is normally bad on sites, but appropriate on university sites because people self-identify and there is typically little overlap in roles.

Overall, this was a fantastic day. I'll cover the third and final day tomorrow.

Voices That Matter Web Design Conference - Part 1

2009-05-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

I know that I have been horribly ignoring this blog in favor of Tales from Redesignland, but with all the work on the actual redesign, I haven't had the energy to do both.

However, last week I went to the Voices That Matter Web Design conference in San Francisco, and I thought that I'd file a report. I'll probably be talking about specific sessions in more detail later, but I wanted to give a summary of the sessions that I went to.

Voices that Matter is an imprint of New Riders publishers, and all of the presenters were authors, including some big names like Steve Krug, Jesse James Garrett, Jared Spool, etc.

Overall, the conference was pretty stunning, and by the end my brain was full.

People Filing in:

Other photos (not mine) from the conference.

Tuesday

Keynote: Marketing Obama: Social Media Gets a Seat at the Table - Rahaf Harfoush
An interesting look inside the Obama campaign, but to me it provided little in the form of take-aways regarding the use of social media.

Sorry. Web 1.0 Is No Longer Supported - Joel Postman
More a history of web-based social media than anything else, so it was a bit disappointing. Very interesting discussion on flogs, splogs, blogola, astroturfing and other shady practices in the blogosphere. Shorttask is an very interesting example, where you can get paid 5 cents to post a positive comment on a blog post.

Take-aways: People aren't particularly nice on the internetz.

Free Range Content: Unlock Your Ideas to Increase Your Reach - Aarron Walter
I was the most disappointed in this session, not because it was a bad presentation (it was actually very good), but because it was nothing new to me. RSS and Flickr... yeah, I've heard of them. I was more interested in content strategies than learning how to reuse existing content.

Take-aways: Content can be used more than once in one place.

The Trusted Filter: Designing for Credibility - Jason Cranford Teague
This presentation was all about how to gain and hold the trust of your site's visitors. For me it seemed a bit fragmented.

Take-aways: Not really sure.

So, Monday was the weakest day, and I was feeling that (beside the fact that like only two people were Twittering) it was pretty lame at this point. But Wednesday and Thursday were night-and-day better... and they'll follow in part 2.

Home Page Elements - Installment 3

2008-11-19T12:57:00.000-08:00

Every year I take a look at a number of newly designed university home pages and break down their component elements. Last year's analysis is in this post.

This year, I took 15 university or college home pages that had been redesigned within the past year (as posted on eduStyle.net) and had received more positive than negative votes.

Most Common Page Elements

The most notable changes here are the continued climb of events/calendars, and the decline of top banners.

Element	Sites 2006	Sites 2007	Sites 2008
Photos	100%	100%	100%
Primary Navigation	100%	100%	100%
Search Box	100%	94%	100%
News	85%	83%	93%
Events	30%	67%	87%
Secondary Navigation	70%	78%	73%
Feature/Spotlight	55%	78%	73%
Top Banner	90%	78%	60%
Quick Links	45%	22%	33%

Page Element Placement

Once again, no huge changes. Some of the overlays look a bit different since I was using a bigger monitor this year to capture the screenshots. Other than that, a few trends, but no major shifts.

Logos and brands continue to congregate more toward the upper lefthand corner
Primary navigation is pretty consistently below the brand, either vertically or horizontally
News is trending a bit more toward the center, and events a bit more further to the right

2006 is on the left, 2007 in the middle, and 2008 on the right.

Top Banner
Identity/Logo

Search Box

Primary Navigation

Secondary Navigation

Main Photo

Other Photos

Feature Item

News

Events/Calendar

Quick Links

Twitter, Twitter, where art thou Twitter?

2008-07-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

This is in response to this post by Kyle James.

I love Twitter and use it and follow a bunch people, but I'm not sure what to make of Twitter in the sense of how "important" it is.

Is it the next email? (by which I mean life/work transforming killer app, not something that has been horribly abused by spammers) Doubtful. Email, for those of us that remember when email became part of our lives, really changed the way we worked and kept in touch with people we knew.

Twitter is not that revolutionary, though it has allowed be to befriend and converse with people I've never met and know little about (other than what I've picked up via Twitter).

Ten years from now, what will we be saying about Twitter? I think that's one way to think about the potential importance of Twitter.

Email is so useful, that despite it's flaws, it will still be here in ten years. Twitter? I doubt it, particularly if it can't address it's stability and downtime issues. Something better will come along and replace it.

Will Twitter ever reach the critical mass that email has? Doubtful again. How many people can you follow in Twitter before so much scrolls by that you never see? If more and more people use it, the streaming nature of Twitter will work against it.

Email lets you deal with it at your own pace. Emails don't go anywhere. Technically, neither do tweets, but the nature of tweets is in the now. Two day old tweets are... not interesting. Two day old emails may be interesting, depending on what they are.

What, fundamentally, is the purpose of Twitter? You tell me:

Vital communication tool
Way to keep in touch with friends
Way to feel connected to a virtual community
Instant vanity publishing
Strange combination of communication and instant gratification
Way to waste time by watching other people's lives
All of the above

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Part 1 - Humboldt State University

2008-06-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

Part 1 in series analyzing the good and bad things about a variety of university home pages.

As I've mentioned before, we at CSU, Chico are just beginning the process of 'redeveloping' our top level pages (I hate the word 'redesign' because it doesn't convey the entire scope of the process - which encompasses a lot more than a new graphic design).

As part of that process, it's vital to understand what works and what doesn't on other university Web sites.

I'm starting with Humboldt State's Web site because it does so many things so well.

Consistency

Consistency is a big issue with any university Web site, due in large part to the inherent autonomy that university's grant their colleges and departments. At many schools, each department has complete control over the design and organization of their site, and they may even maintain their own Web servers. Lacking central control and branding authority, university sites tend to devolve into a mishmash of designs.

Humboldt State's site is no different, but they've managed to at least create a top tier of pages that present a basic design and organizational consistency.Even though the main navigation moves around a bit, all pages have a similar simple layout and design that clearly communicates that you are on the Humboldt site.

Navigational Grouping

The worst kind of navigation is the kitchen sink kind, where everything is just randomly dropped into a long list, with no grouping of similar items or any thought to organization.

Humboldt has clearly thought out their navigation with the goal of keeping it simple and clean, without overwhelming users with too many choices.

There are four navigational regions on home page:

Alphabetical Index
"Main" navigation

Admissions
Majors & Programs
About Humboldt
Living Here
Athletics

Audience-oriented navigation

Future Students
Current Students
Parents & Families
Faculty & Staff
Alumni & Friends

"Recruiting" navigation

Explore
Inquire
Visit
Apply

Each navigational area is clearly defined by its position on the page, the white space around it and even by using different fonts and font sizes for each region.

Messaging

One of the things I think that Humboldt's home page does best is communicate a clear message to users, particularly prospective students. This is done through the photos and stories on the home page.

As I've discussed in previous posts (here and here), home page photos should communicate something specific that is different or special about your school, and ideally, they should have a context (like a story). Humboldt's site excels at this.

You can see all of their home page photos and stories on this page. Of the 14 photo/stories:

4 relate to outdoor activities
3 relate to environmental issues
3 relate to social activism
2 relate to art

Those are clearly the main selling points of Humboldt State and it's region, and the message is clear: if you're interested in the environment, outdoor activities, social activism or art, Humboldt is the place for you.

Audience Prioritization

40% of the entire home page is dedicated to the photos and the links designed to grab the attention of prospective students. If you include the main navigation (which is aimed primarily at prospective students) and the News and Events sections (which might be of interest to prospective students), 64% of the home page is directed toward prospective students.

Is this good or bad? I guess it depends on how you define the goals of your home page, but recruiting new students has to be one of your top priorities.

Dedicated Temporary Content Region

One issue CSU, Chico's site has is dealing with temporary content or links that need some prominence. Though we have a space for announcements, we don't have a place to highlight special news or events. Humboldt dealt with this issue by dedicating the lower right-hand corner of the home page to eye-catching graphical announcements that change periodically.

The Bad and the Ugly

I don't have a lot of complaints about the Humboldt site. Most of my criticisms are minor nit picks like moving the navigation on interior pages, occasional pages with excessive chattery text (example), moving the search box to the bottom of interior pages, etc.

Final Score

I love handing out grades. I makes me feel like I know what I'm talking about.

1-10 scale

Design	9
Usability	9
Branding	8
Messaging	9
Organization	8
Navigation	9
TOTAL	52

Lou Rosenfeld on the Redesign Process

2008-05-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

Great presentation by Lou Rosenfeld (of O'Reilly's Information Architecture fame) on the university Web site Redesign process, titled "Redesign Must Die".

Just a couple of nuggets:

"Every time you redesign, God kills a kitten."
"Ban the word 'Redesign' at your next meeting."

He even uses one of my Tales from Redesignland cartoons!

http://www.slideshare.net/lrosenfeld/redesign-must-die-381947/

The Redesign Process - Step 0

2008-04-28T10:18:00.001-07:00

Rumor has it that our university is about to begin the process of redesigning our home page. That's the 'future endeavour' that the title of this blog refers to... and it's about to begin! The first meeting of the new "web content committee" (bad name, I know) is scheduled for this Friday.

Praise the Lord! But...

But, as we all know, if the process gets off on the wrong foot, it will very difficult to correct things and snatch success out of the jaws of failure.

Here's just one example of how we could get off on the wrong foot: "I've never liked the gold stripe on the home page. Whatever we do, we should get rid of that."

If that's the way things start, success will be very difficult to achieve. Why? Because arguing about design details that are based solely on personal opinions leads nowhere and can accomplish nothing positive.

The truth is that "design" (i.e., graphic design) is actually a very small part of the redesign process (no offense to graphic designers).

The real work of redesign isn't as simple as blurting out your uneducated opinions on color and layout.

The real work of redesign is more about realigning your site to better meet your users' needs and your university's goals, messaging, branding and strategic priorities than it is about flash animations and pretty pictures.

Build the House Before you Hang the Drapes

Think of the Web site redesign process like building a house. You can't hang the drapes before you build the walls, and you can't build the walls until you have a floor plan, and you can't draw a floor plan until you know the needs of the family that will live there.

Likewise, you can't choose the design elements before you've built a wireframe of the site, and you can't build a wireframe until you've developed an information architecture for the site, and you can't develop an information architecture until you understand the needs of your users and the goals your organization has for the site.

So step one cannot be a discussion of your opinions of the existing site or what you think should be in the new site. It should be all about asking questions. Here's just a few:

Who are our users?
What do they want on the site?
What do they do on the current site?
What do they like about the current site?
What do they hate?
What problems do they have with the current site?
What/who are we competing against?
What are they doing?
What do our users like about other sites?
What are our goals for the site?
What do we want our home page to accomplish and for whom?
What is our brand and how will that be applied to the site?
What is the message we want to communicate on our home page?
Do we even have the proper stakeholders involved in the process?

Notice that your opinion doesn't appear in any of these questions. That's because at this phase, it isn't about you (sorry!). It's about beginning the process of aligning your institution's goals to your users' needs.

Once you start to ask these questions, you'll realize that you need to gather some actual data and talk to some people in order to get answers to these questions.

That will be the topic of my next post.

Chico's New Online Photo Catalog - Likes and Dislikes

2008-04-01T16:08:00.001-07:00

In my other life, I'm a professional photographer, with several Web sites (here and here). So when our department decided to put our internal photo catalog online, I was volunteered (er...recruited) to do the development for it.

I have a lot of experience with stock photography sites (since my work is carried by several - excluding royalty free and microstock, may Allah strike them dead in His infinite mercy), so I know what I like and dislike in online photo sites.

Now, I didn't shoot any of these photos; that's not my job on campus, but we do have a staff photographer who does official campus photography for everything from faculty portraits to events, receptions, general publications and the University Catalog.

The backend of the catalog uses Portfolio 8.5 server. For my personal business, I use iView Media Pro, but Portfolio is pretty similar overall. Both have pros and cons, and I'll refrain from Portfolio bashing.

Initially, we had a lot of problems with hardware, permissions and networking, but once we resolved all that, I was able to begin work on the Web front end. We went with the built in NetPublish tool which uses a JavaScript-based API. I've decided that I like it.

Even though it's still in serious beta mode with lots of missing pieces and content (particularly payment and policies), you can look at it here: http://images.csuchico.edu.

What I Like

It seems a bit weird to review a site that I developed, since mostly I pick at other people's sites. It also seems like tooting my own horn a bit to say, "Look at this site I did! I think it's really cool!!"

But I actually do like this site. I just wish I had time to redo my business sites to match.

OK, so here's what I like...

Number of Results per Page
You can change the number of results that you view per page. Though the default is 16, I like to view as many photos as I can on a single page. Oh, and it remembers your preference from search to search, but only for the current session (Portfolio limitation).

Dynamic Page Width
I hate static width layouts of image thumbnails. I have a 1600 pixel wide monitor at home and two 1280 pixel monitors side-by-side at work, so why can't I use all that space to look at thumbnails? With this site you can. I just organized the thumbnails in divs so that they automatically wrap to match your browser window's width. Cool!

Pop Up Image Previews
We used OverLib to pop up image previews when you roll over each thumbnail. An awesome way to quickly browse through photos. I used the Portfolio NetPublish API to add some pertinent info to the pop up. No more having to go to a separate page to see larger versions of each photo. Super cool!!

Popup Image Information
Our graphic designer was particularly worried that people will want images that aren't big enough to be reproduced well at the size they want in the medium they want. We went around a bit on the best way to do this. I ended up adding an OverLib popup that calculates the dimensions that each photo can be used at different resolutions. It's simple and clear, but doesn't take up space on the page.

Bigger Previews
If you want to see an image even bigger, and view even more detailed info (such as EXIF data, exposure data, etc., if available) on the image, you can click on it and go to a detail page. Nice to have.

Thumbnail Pop Ups on Check Out Page
I hate stock sites that don't let you see what you're buying on the check out page. I also hate stock sites that show a huge list of thumbnails on the check out page - it just makes the page too long when you have to scroll and scroll to see your total cost at the bottom. So I used OverLib to make pop up thumbnails.

Issues

OK, it isn't perfect. Here's a partial list of what still needs work.

We still have problems with vertically-oriented RAW images not being rotated correctly (that's a Portfolio limitation)
We still have a lot of missing previews (they have to be rebuilt manually)
The left nav menu is static, so there are a lot of categories listed that currently have no photos in them.
OverLib does a weird flickering thing sometimes that drives me nuts
We still have a lot of crappy images cluttering up the catalog
We need better keywording (we're working on that)
We're still fine tuning the advanced search (Portfolio's search is limited and not very smart)

You might not like that there's no automatic download, but we really can't allow that since there are a lot of photos of staff and faculty that shouldn't be freely available. And anyway, the idea here is to try to bring in a little money from departments on campus for the use of photos that we took.

Let me know what you think.

Accessible Instructional Multimedia: Live blog from CATS 2008

2008-03-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

AIMs are online multimedia resources that demo to faculty the use of accessible technologies in teaching.

AIMs enable faculty to understand the ways that emerging technologies can be used to support student success.

Project supported by EnACT to help faculty and staff to develop accessibility training resources to help faculty learn about incorporating accessibility into their course materials... or at least I think that what's this is about... actually, not all of them are about accessibility, but most are.

AIM projects are added to MERLOT repository. Most appear to be videos.

Total of 40 projects planned from eight CSUs... 6 from Chico... wOOt!

6 completed to date, 13 under development.

Next round of projects... applications due in April

Topics wanted:

Universal design for learning
Assistive technology
Distance Learning
Technologies designed to address particular Instructional challenges
Case studies on deploying accessible course materials
Other topics

Examples

LecShare - accessible PPT
Pachyderm

Then it all devolved into one guy asking a bunch of questions...

Pop Up Menus

2008-03-03T13:08:00.001-08:00

We had a recent discussion about using pop ups menus on our sites.

Should the top level menu items be links to a 'main' page or should they just be text to hover over to show the pop up menu? What about menus with combinations of simple links and pop up sub-menus? If there is a link to a 'main' page, what should be on that page?

Sounded like a job for ResearchMan!

Here are my informal results...

General Sites

For the most part, hover menus are not that popular. I looked at about 90 sites (Amazon, eBay, CNN, etc., etc.) and only about 20% used hover menus. That's not to say that they are a bad thing; they just aren't as common as we might think.

Menu Item is Link with Main Page

MSNBC uses hover menus that list major news categories. The first item in the menu is "[Category] Front Page". Clicking on the hover text takes you to the category front page. Time uses similar functioning drop down menus. Clicking on the menu item takes you to the main page for the news category.

A number of other sites follow a similar model, though these do not have the main page listed at the top of the pop up list.

Menu Item is Link with Visual Aid

Geek.com uses a visual aid (an arrow) to indicate which menu items are pop ups. There are actually a couple of sites that do this.

Menu Item is not Link

A few sites use a model where menu items with pop ups are not themselves links, but menu items without pop ups are links.

Higher Education

Pop up menus are about as common on university home pages as they are on commercial sites.

Menu Item is Link with Main Page

Of the 40 or so university sites I reviewed, this was the only kind of pop up that I found.

The contents of the 'main page' under a link varied, from 'Welcome' pages filled with happy talk, to links to other sites, to pages of links that essentially repeated the contents of the submenus. On some sites, all of these were present on different links. Some sites included single links as well as pop ups in the same menu, without distinguishing between them (e.g., FSU and Syracuse).

Recommendations

It seems pretty clear that the clear majority of sites make the top level menu items links to some sort of main page. I think it almost approaches a 'standard' practice. I do like the idea of visually distinguishing between simple links and links that have pop up sub-menus.

The destination of the top level link varies. With news sites, it typically goes to something like the "US News" or "Sports" front page. With shopping sites, it might be to the "Electronics" main page.

For university sites, it's a bit less clear, and the destination of the link should probably be determined on a case-by-case basis. Ideally, it would link to a page with relevant information, but there are cases where there might not be much information to put under the main category (this might be particularly true with smaller departmental sites).

So, it might end up linking to a page that just repeats the list of items in the sub-menus. This is sub-optimal, however, and every effort should be made to make the 'main' page contentful (new word!) and relevant. One thing is clear, though... as Steve Krug says in Don't Make me Think, "happy talk must die"! No one reads "Welcome" pages or "Message from the Dean" pages. eliminate them! A list of links is more useful.

Pimping Your Campus

2008-02-27T15:29:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I asked our provost how budget cuts would affect recruitment and recruitment strategies (see this post).

As Provosts are wont, she gave a very long and detailed answer that appeared to be mostly in a foreign language. However, I did catch a few key phrases.

One thing in particular stuck with me. She said that they've done research that shows that we have much higher conversion rates (is that the term you recruitment folks use?) if they can just get the people to visit the campus. She said that a lot of people come, see the campus and want to immediately enroll.

And it's true. Chico state has a beautiful campus located at the edge of a lively small town downtown area. Chico, our Provost said, is seen as an appealing destination, particularly once people see it.

That made me think that that is one the main messages our Web site should be communicating. At every turn, it should be saying, "This is a beautiful place. This is a great place to live."

bottom line: we need to pimp our campus (as in more effectively advertise it's beauty and desirability).

As you may know, in my other life, I'm a professional photographer, and I enjoy shooting our campus. A while back I was playing with an idea for a small photo book showcasing the campus as a beautiful natural environment through the seasons. I uploaded a mock up to the Web... and pretty much left it there.

As it is, I don't think this is much of a tool for promoting our campus, but I do think that it could be turned into something that could be very effective in at least communicating to people that this is a special, beautiful place, and you should come visit.

I'd be happy to hear your impressions and thoughts.

Y'all come visit, y'hear!

Page Titles - Best Practices

2008-02-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

Title tags are vital from both usability and SEO perspectives. We use the following format for page title tags: Page Title - Department Name - University Name.

I just finished writing up these standards for our own Web site and realized that they are practices that all universities could benefit from.

Although technically optional, title tags are one of the most vital pieces of information that you can put on your Web pages.

Why? There are several reasons:

The Title tag is what appears at the top of your browser window, in the title bar and identifies the page users are viewing (see image, below).
The Title tag is what appears in the tabs in the browser window, and identifies the content of each tab (see image, below).
The Title tag is what appears in the user's Bookmarks or Favorites when they bookmark your page.
Search engines like Google place a lot of weight on Title tags when ranking search results.

Browser Title Bar:

Browser Tabs:

As a result of the importance of the Title tag, we at Chico State have developed a set of best practices to use when assigning Title tags to your page.

Page Title Standards

Use the following format for page title tags: Page Title - Department Name - University Name

Examples:

Faculty and Staff - Geography and Planning Department - CSU, Chico
Academic Services - Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs - CSU, Chico
Current Students - College of Business - CSU, Chico

Reasons:

You want to include your department name and the university's name in all Title tags so that users searching for "geography faculty chico" will find your page. If you don't include your department name or the university name, you dramatically reduce the odds that your page will turn up in the search results.

Also, the order in which the elements appear is also important. Since browser tabs can only show the beginning of the page title, you want to have the most specific information (the current page's title) first, followed by the department and then the university. Pages titled like "CSU, Chico - Department Name - Page Title" will all appear as "CSU, Chico" in the browser tabs (see images, below).

Wrong: University Name - Department Name - Page Title

All the pages below are different, but you can't tell which is which by the page title, since they all start with "California State University, Chico".

Browser Tabs
Favorites

Right: Page Title - Department Name - University Name

Page titles with the specific page's title first:

Browser Tabs
Favorites

Home Page Titles

Home page titles should just be the department name and the university name: Department Name - University Name.

Examples:

Office of the President - CSU, Chico
Geography and Planning Department - CSU, Chico

Do not use "Home" or "Welcome" in your home page title. Nobody searches for "home" or "welcome" and they take up valuable space in the browser tabs (see images, below).

Wrong: Welcome/Home - University Name - Department Name

All these home pages are different, but we can't tell which is which.

Browser Tabs
Favorites

Right: Department Name - University Name

These home pages all use just the department name and the university name.

Browser Tabs
Favorites

Analyzing the Future - Part 5 - Page Structure

2008-02-12T13:28:00.001-08:00

An examination of the organization of page content from a semantic perspective. Sounds scary, but it's mostly about clean, simple, accessible, and well organized HTML on your home page.

In previous posts in this series, I've looked at home page content from a number of different perspectives (navigation, page dimensions, page elements). This time, I wanted to look at the structure of content from a more semantic perspective.

HTML coders (the good ones, anyway) are obsessed with good semantic code; nice hierarchical structures, valid XHMTL, etc. But you can have a well-formed, semantically perfect page that is an incomprehensible, poorly organized and impossible to use site.

The goal is to have good semantics and good organization. If you do that, the odds are that you'll also have good accessibility as well.

Methodology

As usual for this series, I victimized my usual 18 standard sites.

For this analysis, I turned off all CSS and and replaced all images with ALT text using the Web Developer Toolbar in Firefox. This provided me with a semantic view of each page, stripped of the fancy graphics and colors designed to fool me into wanting to attend their school.

I ended up looking at pages like this:

Why would I look at pages like this? A couple of reasons. First, to be able to see the real organization of information on the page, and second (and more importantly) because disabled users using screen readers and users on cell phones often access your pages just like this.

Results

I saw a lot of variations in page organization, and a variety of good and bad practices.

Only two sites used table-based layouts. Yea!

Eight sites had some sort of "Skip to..." navigation at the top of the page, though NC State kind of went overboard with six different "Skip to..." links at the top of the page. "Skip to Content" was the most popular, with "Skip to Navigation" a close second.

A couple of sites put all their links at the bottom of the page. This might have been deliberate in order to focus on the content, but home pages tend to be portal pages, so navigation should be prominent and easily accessible.

Search boxes tended to be toward the top of the page, but not always. I think for disabled users, search boxes must be very difficult to find on most Web pages.

Semantically, sites were all over the map. Some sites, like UT Knoxville and Loyola Marymount, followed valid heading organization. Other sites, used a mix of only H4 and H5 tags, all H3 tags, etc., etc. Some used no headings at all.

There were also a few pages (e.g., University of St. Thomas) appeared to be all links and little content.

Recommendations and Best Practices

Based on my examination of the 18 home pages, I came up with a list of best practices to look for:

Complete separation of content and presentation (via CSS-based design)

This includes CSS-based layout instead of table-based layouts

Semantic HTML

Based on properly ordered and nested heading tags (H1, H2, etc.)

Presence of descriptive ALT tags for all non-content free images

Images that are just pretty pictures can have empty ALT tags

Presence of navigational shortcuts at the top of each page

e.g., "Skip to Content" links

Reasonable mix of content and navigation

Who wants a page that's nothing but links? It makes your home page look like a link farm.

Prominent placement of search box

Typically very near the top of the page, or the placement of a navigational shortcut to the search box at the top

Prominent placement of the name of the institution

This should be your H1 tag (ya think?)

What would the "perfect" page look like? Well, the actual content would depend on your site, but you can see a sample bare-bones page here, or look at the layout below.

Sample Page:

Hypothetical State University

Navigation

Content

News & Announcements

News Item 1

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nullam suscipit, tortor quis sollicitudin porttitor, diam metus aliquam ante, ut sodales felis purus ac quam. Mauris ut erat in ipsum laoreet lacinia. More...

News Item 2

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Donec varius tempus urna. Phasellus porta blandit lacus. Nunc nec arcu et metus sodales ullamcorper. Mauris vitae leo id sapien sagittis lacinia. More...

More News...

Events Calendar

February 14, 2008

Valentine's Day Massacre - Have a bang at the SMC Cartage Garage!

February 20, 2008

Integer mattis dolor vel felis. Aliquam viverra nunc eget leo. Pellentesque interdum urna non purus.

More Events...

Hypothetical State University
123 Main St.
Anytown, USA 12345
1-800-345-6789
info@hsu.edu
Copyright © 2008 HSU

What is the Purpose of a University Web Site?

2008-02-05T13:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday our CIO was going over the new Web governance structure being implemented at our campus. According to him, one of the missions of this new Web governance structure is to "determine the purpose of the university's Web site."* It seems like a reasonable question.

Now, I've taken a small poke at that issue in a previous post, but I got afraid and ran away from it because it seemed big and scary.

But it's a real issue... or is it?

If you put it in the terms of, "does our university Web site have a purpose?", you better hope the answer is "hell yes!" instead of "not that I'm aware of", but trying to define that purpose is not so easy.

Of course, you're all saying, "the Web site doesn't have a single purpose." And let's face it; it's not even one Web site; it's many Web sites, under the control of many different people, and serving many different audiences and needs.

As a result, I'm not personally convinced that we can come up with a "definitive" answer to this question. I believe that we have to take a more molecular view of the site. That is, I think that we can say, "OK, we need to do this. And we need to have that. And there has to be this component", without having to have a complete "big picture" view.

Not that I don't believe in the "big picture" approach, or even agree with it; I do. I just feel that the Web as an environment, as a tool, and as a platform is too complex and evolving too rapidly for definitive, big picture answers.

Of course, that doesn't change the political reality that the CIO expects the Web governance suckas (er... committee members) to determine the purpose of the university's Web site.

Personally, I plan to be sick that year.

I'm sure some of you have encountered this issue. How have you approached it? Dealt with it? Defused it? Succumbed to it?

*(for the sake of simplicity, I'm assuming here that he was referring to the campus's public Web site, www.csuchico.edu, and not all the other Web-based applications, such as the portal or the LMS).

A Beautiful Nightmare

2008-01-22T09:02:00.000-08:00

Wherein I worry that lowly end users of our content management system will turn our beautiful new Web site into an unnavigatable mess.

After years of beating around the bush, we're finally going to be getting an enterprise Web content management system (WCMS) for Chico State. We're getting Hannon Hill Cascade Server, but that's not the point of this post.

I've fought very hard for an enterprise WCMS over the past several years, but the closer we've gotten to getting one, the more misgivings I have.

I know that's heresy, but as an admittedly elitist web developer I'm wary of turning the unwashed masses loose on Web sites without adult supervision.

I'm not worried about them putting pink text on green backgrounds - we can control that with pre-made templates.

What I'm worried about is having people with no experience with or (concept of) organizing information creating and attempting to organize departmental Web sites. After all, we're talking about people whose desktops look like this:

(image stolen from this site)

We have spent years thinking about WCMS's. We've spent months reviewing products, trying to select the best one for our needs. We're going to spend more months developing the best and most beautiful templates for people to use. And we're going to hire people to manage this great piece of software and manage a smooth rollout of the technology to campus.

And then we're going to turn over virtually the entire CSU, Chico Web presence to (let's be honest) a bunch of department secretaries and let them turn it into a Web version of their computer desktop.

This isn't making sense to me.

Why bother to invest all this time, money and effort on the back end, if the people who will actually, hands on, implement and manage major pieces of the campus have no idea of what they're doing?

OK, so we'll offer - no, require - training in information architecture, organizational skills, writing for the web, etc. for everyone who will use the WCMS.

Right.

How am I going to sell that? That isn't sexy. The software is sexy (if you're into that sort of stuff, which personally I'm not). New designs are sexy. Training isn't sexy. Information architecture isn't sexy.

The very stakeholders that need to sign off the standards and requirements for the WCMS barely know what information architecture is, so they're not going to get it. If they don't get it, they won't require anyone else to get it.

End result... We end up with a beautifully designed new site, run by a sophisticated piece of content management software, but where the content is an impenetrable mishmash of confusing, redundant, mislabeled links and huge rambling pages of run-on content. Even better, there'll be no consistency across subsites with regard to terminology, labeling, organizational schemes or writing style.

For the user, our Web site will be a beautiful nightmare.

We have to prevent this. I'm open to ideas.

Spin off Blog - "Tales from Redesignland"

2007-12-20T08:58:00.000-08:00

In order to keep the serious stuff from the cartoons, I'm creating a new cartoon blog called "Tales from Redesignland" to chronicle the lives of us poor web developers... particularly those in higher education.

Y'all come visit us, y'hear?

Thoughts on the Redesign Process - The Cartoon Version

2007-12-18T16:48:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not bored, I've just wrapped up all of my projects for the semester.

I saw this page and thought it was a very cute way to visually describe the design process. I don't have any Lego men, so I adapted some free icons to do the job.

1. Get the right high-level decision-making organization in place
Their role is thinking about big picture issues, not micromanaging the process or the design.

2. Assemble the Redesign Team
This team may consist of people from several different departments. The team as shown, is made up of roles; one person may play more than one role. Though boundaries may not really exist, I've divided the team into four groups: technical, design, content, and quality.

3. Define High-level Redesign Goals
Ideally, this should be a conversation between the high-level stakeholders and the team leads (project lead, graphic designer, information architect, usability designer, communications specialist, and technical lead). The stakeholders need to communicate the goals and direction for the new Web presence and the team leads need to ask questions and provide feedback from their specific perspectives.

The conversation needs to be focused on eliciting clear direction from the stakeholders while educating them as to best practices and standards on the Web.

The trap at this stage is to begin to micromanage the process before it even starts. Talk should be in general terms, rather than discussing specific design, content or technology issues.

Wrong: "I think that going with an Aqua-style design, but in green, would be best."
Right: "How do you envision the redesign affecting our branding?"

Wrong: "We should have more dropdown menus!"
Right: "One of our top goals is to simplify the interface of the home page and reduce the clutter of links."

4. Establish Scope, Timeline and Budget
Scope creep will kill you. Avoid it.

5. Establish Standards
Assemble the full redesign team to discuss and establish standards for coding, design, labeling, content, security, accessibility, etc.

6. Do your Homework
Everyone should be involved at some level in this step, but it is most important for the graphic designer, information architect and usability designer to do as much research on trends and best practices as possible.

7. Profile Site Users
Profiling is good. Get your 'user experience' group together (graphic designer, communications specialist, information architect and usability designer) and construct several personas and some scenarios to go with them. This step should start out as a series of 'blue sky' sessions, just exploring the possibilities, but should evolve into a prioritized lists of tasks.

8. Develop & Test Information Architecture(s)
Building off your work with personas and scenarios, begin building out structures and organization...

... and testing them on users using card sorts and wireframes.

9. Develop & Test Visual Designs
Hopefully, you'll have gotten some general design direction from the stakeholders to give you a start.

Show designs to stakeholders and focus groups of users. Refine and repeat until you have final approval.

10. Create and Test a "Protosite"
Probably the smartest thing you'll ever do.

11. Create and Implement Real Site
After fixing all of your mistakes on the protosite, time to build out and test the real thing.

12. Finish Documentation

13. Go Live
14. Plan for Maintenance

I had fun making this. I hope you had fun reading it. I'm sure that there will be more of the motley crew to come.

Thoughts on the Redesign Process

2007-12-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

A look the redesign process for the CSU, Chico home page.

The key to success for any large-scale Web site redesign is a process that works.

Four years ago, I put together a PowerPoint presentation on the Web design process for the Chico State home page. No one ever looked at it, but it's almost as useful today as it was then. With the benefit of four more years of experience, here's a revised version.

The Short Version (for the attention-impaired)

Get the right high-level decision-making organization in place
Assemble the Redesign Team
Define High-level Redesign Goals
Establish Scope, Timeline and Budget
Establish Standards
Do Your Homework
Profile Site Users
Develop & Test Information Architecture(s)
Develop & Test Visual Designs
Create and Test a "Protosite"
Create and Implement Real Site
Finish Documentation
Go Live
Plan for Maintenance

The Long Version (for the terminally bored)

1. Get the right high-level decision-making organization in place
Before you can even begin considering doing a redesign of your home page, you need to have functional, authoritative structures in place for making decisions, and determining and enforcing standards. This should involve people at the highest level possible in order to ensure buy-in as the redesign progresses.

The role of high-level administration should strategic, not tactical, in nature. Their role should be in setting priorities, overall goals, and high-level messaging instead of micromanaging the design, information architecture, labeling, etc.

At Chico State, we have a brand new Web Governance committee, consisting of the CIO and vice presidents.

2. Assemble the Redesign Team
You can't actually conduct a redesign without competent people in responsible positions. Nor can you respond to questions posed by administration concerning the redesign without qualified people on staff.

A large scale redesign like a university Web site requires a number of roles (one person may fill several roles):

Project Lead
Technical Lead
Graphic/Visual Designer
Information Architect
Interaction/Usability Designer
HTML Coder
Programmer
Web Server Administrator
Multimedia Developer
Photographer
Accessibility Designer
Writer
Content Manager/Editor
Communications Specialist
Quality Assurance

Skimping on any of these areas can cause you major grief down the line. Your best bet for success is a cooperative interdisciplinary team that may span several organizations on campus (most notably Information Technology and University Advancement).

At Chico State, we have the design/technical/IA/usability people under two closely related roofs, but lack a close relationship with the Advancement folks.

3. Define High-level Redesign Goals
This step really needs to be a conversation between the administration and the redesign team. The administrators bring an awareness of the university's top priorities, goals, concerns and issues to the table, while the design team brings knowledge of technologies, standards, best practices, other university Web sites, as well as a lot of experience with the Web redesign process that administrators may lack.

A strictly top down approach is likely to result in a site neither well organized, well designed or usable. A bottom up approach is likely to result in a site that lacks focus and fails to meet the top priority needs of the campus.

Example goals might include:

Create new, fresher, more “hip” look
Implement strategic goals for university web presence
Improve navigation/site structure
Make site easier to use
Address accessibility issues
Attract more new students
Fulfill university core objectives
Improve site performance
Make site easier to maintain/change
Enhance university image/branding
Increase design consistency across entire site
Implement new technologies (e.g., WCMS)

4. Establish Scope, Timeline and Budget
The biggest danger in undertaking a project like redesigning a campus Web site is scope creep. Scope creep will kill any project and can permanently damage working relationships on campus. It must be avoided at all costs.

Establish a clear list of what will and will not be done
Clearly define personnel to be involved (including timebase and responsibilities)
Establish clear milestones
Plan for content lag
Write a detailed production plan outlining major goals, strategy, resources & timeline

5. Establish Standards
One thing that has saved Web Services from endless trouble and heartache over the years is the fact that we invested a lot of time early on in developing standards (everything from design standards to file naming standards to accessibility standards to labeling standards).

Before you get into do a redesign, you need to develop a comprehensive standards document and make sure that everyone sticks to it. Some standards to consider:

Coding (XHTML, CSS, file naming, etc.)
Accessibility
Security
Graphic design
Communications (branding, brand usage)
Labeling
Content (writing guidelines, etc.)

6. Do your Homework
You can't fix a problem if you don't know that there is a problem, and you still can't fix a problem you've identified if you don't know what your options are. So this step is two-fold:

Analyze and test your existing site
Educate yourself as to what other sites are doing

This entire blog is dedicated to this step, and I can't stress the importance of this step enough. You skip it at your own risk.

To better understand your existing site, you should:

Examine log files for usage and patterns (Google Analytics is great for this)
Do a page structure analysis
Create a visual site map to better understand the site’s existing structure
Conduct usability testing of existing site (to identify specific problems)
Audit existing content

To educate yourself as to what others are doing, you could read this blog or search for university redesign blogs.

7. Profile Site Users
Real Web designers profile their site users; the rest of us are just posers. Profiling (in this case profiling is good) allows you to role play in a sense; to get inside the heads of your users and see your site from their perspective. This is vital for administrators and designers who have a radically different view of the campus Web site than a 17 year-old high school student looking for a place to go to college.

Some steps in profiling:

Categorize users (currents students, faculty staff, alumni, etc.)
What are their characteristics?
- Demographics
- Browser versions used
- Internet access (broadband/modem)
Develop personas for testing/designing purposes
- 6-8 should be sufficient
Why personas?
- They personalize the users you are designing for
- Helps you visualize how each persona might approach the site
- Used in testing scenarios (how would Davin the art student use this feature?)

8. Develop & Test Information Architecture(s)
Now we start to get to the meat of the process.

Examine what other universities have done
Develop taxonomies
Do card sorting tests
Conduct task analysis for common tasks that have poor task modeling on current site
Develop site maps
Develop and test wireframes
Conduct user scenarios to keep IA on track
Get feedback from administration on IA finalists

9. Develop & Test Visual Designs
To most people, this phase is the only phase of a redesign. Certainly, it is the most visible.

Develop design concepts
Refine into designs (must follow wireframes)
Insure that designs stick to the architecture
Get feedback (e.g., focus groups)
Get approval (powers that be must sign off on the design)

10. Create and Test a "Protosite"
The purpose of testing a protosite is to give people a chance to use the site before it goes live. This allows you to work out a lot of bugs in design, IA and usability before subjecting it to the entire campus. Some universities do a public "beta" with the protosite in order to get a wider range of feedback. Protosites are easy to set up if you have a WCMS.

Create skeleton site (ising proposed visual design, navigation & site structure)
Multiple alternate designs can be tested
Conduct usability testing with real users
Refine design and structure based on results

11. Create and Implement Real Site
This is the final dress rehearsal before going live and the last chance to tweak designs, templates and content. This is where the QA and testing really kicks in to find bugs and problems, make sure that all pages are accessible, make sure that all pages work with supported browsers, etc.

You might consider making this site available to users as well for testing and feedback. Using a tool like Google Analytics, you can get valuable information about how people are using the new site even before it officially goes live.

12. Finish Documentation
Haha! Documentation is never finished. Documentation should have started no later than step 4 (Establish Standards). We use a wiki for all of our documentation and I can't recommend that approach highly enough.

Style Guide (fonts, colors, page dimensions, banners, etc.)
Production Standards Guide (file naming conventions, code standards, CSS, etc.)
Page Templates (can be in WCMS)

13. Go Live
Finally. Couldn't we have just hired a student to do a new home page and left it at that?

Freeze all design and content
Complete QA testing
Plan announcement strategy (vitally important! - people HATE surprises)
Consider phased, or soft, launch
Have a “What’s Changed” page
Transfer to live server
Party!

14. Plan for Maintenance
Actually, this should be done long before the site goes live. If you have a WCMS, maintenance will be part of that project's implementation plan.

Get post-launch feedback from users
Fix bugs, serious problems
Determine who is responsible for maintaining what
Train departmental editors (make them familiar with standards, and with maintaining site integrity)

Web Design Process Resources

Website Production Management Techniques (Adobe)
Web Style Guide
User-Centered Design (University of Washington)
University of Vermont Web Redesign Project
Web Redesign 2.0 - Workflow that Works
The Unusually Useful Web Book
Avoiding Edge Case by Designing Up Front

Analyzing the Future - Part 4 - Home Page Elements

2007-12-17T13:39:00.000-08:00

An analysis of the placement of page elements on 18 newly redesigned college/university home pages.

This post is in essence a repeat of the research I did a year ago on the top 20 university Web sites. You can read that post here. The difference here is that the sites I'm looking at are completely different and they've all been redesigned within the past year.

I've changed a few bits this time around, so I went back and redid the numbers from last time to properly correspond.

Most Common Page Elements

No major changes here except that features and events have become more popular, and "quick links" have become much less popular.

Element	Sites 2006	Sites 2007
Photos	100%	100%
Primary Navigation	100%	100%
Search Box	100%	94%
News	85%	83%
Top Banner	90%	78%
Secondary Navigation	70%	78%
Feature/Spotlight	55%	78%
Events	30%	67%
Quick Links	45%	22%

Page Element Placement

I've placed the results from 2006 on the left and from this year on the right. Overall, there were few earthshaking changes, but there were a few trends:

Identity/logo branding is more consistently placed in the upper left-hand corner
Search box placement in the upper right-hand corner has become almost universal
Primary navigation is less concentrated on the left side of the page, and is becoming more common on the top or upper right
Secondary photos have become more common and tend to be concentrated below and to the right of the main photo
Feature item area is increasing in size
News and events continue to be concentrated on the lower left-hand and right-hand portions of the page (respectively)

Top Banner

Identity/Logo
Search Box

Primary Navigation
Secondary Navigation
Main Photo

Other Photos

Feature Item
News
Events/Calendar
Quick Links

Analyzing the Future - Part 3 - Navigation

2007-12-13T09:48:00.000-08:00

A look at at links and navigational structures used on newly redesigned college/university home pages. Topical organizations (About, Admissions, Academics, etc.) are most popular in the most prominent navigational areas, while audience-oriented links are most common in secondary navigational areas. The usual crud (Contact, Directory, Site Map) is most common in tertiary navigation areas.

Navigation (which links, what they're called, where they're placed, how they're grouped and organized) is probably the single most fascinating topic for me in reviewing Web sites.

There are a lot of potential approaches, but interestingly enough there are actually a number of standout trends in the 18 sites I reviewed.

Methodology

Gawddamn methodology again. What is this, some ivory tower university? Oh, yeah.

I've done other examinations of home page navigation (here and here), and I will revisit those. But for this analysis, I wanted a slightly different approach.

Home pages are complex entities, serving many purposes. As a result, most have more than a single navigational area (by navigational area, I mean a clearly defined area with a cluster of links and no other content).

For the purposes of this analysis, I've broken these navigational areas into:

Primary navigation (usually the largest and most prominent navigational area)
Secondary navigation (usually not as prominent, but still easily identifiable, often providing a contrasting navigational scheme to the primary; e.g., audience vs. topical)
Tertiary navigation (the fine print links typically clustered at the top and/or bottom of the page)

Here's a good example:

Results

Primary and Secondary Navigation

Virtually every home page examined had navigational areas that could be interpreted as primary, secondary and tertiary, though there could easily be disagreements as to which was primary and which secondary. I made my best guess.

Far and away the most common navigational setup among these sites was to split the primary and secondary navigations between topical and audience-oriented organizations. Most common was to use the primary navigation for topical links and the secondary navigation for audience-oriented links, but a significant minority reversed this approach.

	Primary	Secondary
Topic	12	5
Audience	4	10

The most common topical links in the primary and secondary nav areas were:

Link	# of Sites
About (university)	16
Academics	13
Athletics	12
Admissions	12
Campus Life/Student Life	11
Research	9

Interestingly, "Programs" and "Colleges & Departments" (and equivalent terms), which I expected to be prominent, were not common at all. Programs appeared in the primary or secondary navigation only 4 times, and Colleges & Departments only twice.

The most common audience-oriented links in the primary and secondary nav areas were:

Link	# of Sites
Alumni	16
Current Students	14
Faculty/Staff	13
Prospective/Future Students	10
Parents	8

Tertiary Navigation

Tertiary navigation areas consist mostly of small links across the top or bottom of the page. The most common links in these areas were:

Link	# of Sites
Contact Us	12
Employment/Jobs	9
Directory/A-Z Index	7
Maps	7
Site Map	7
Giving	6
Portal	6

Number of Links

The average number of links in each of the three navigational areas was between 5 and 6, though there was a higher variation in the tertiary links because they were scattered around the page. The primary nav tended to have more links than the secondary nav, which was more concentrated at 5 or 6 links long.

Analyzing the Future - Part 2 - Page Dimensions

2007-12-12T15:54:00.000-08:00

Looking at page dimensions of newly redesigned college/university home pages.

In my last post, I selected 18 newly redesigned college or university home pages to analyze, looking for trends, best practices, etc.

So what first?

Well, one of my pet peeves are pages that are too wide to fit on my 640x480 monitor.

OK, OK, I have two 1280x1024 monitors on my desk, but in general, I find that a browser window width of about 900-960 is the most comfortable for me. I HATE having to blow my browser up to full screen to see a whole page. Other people on campus have different, less correct, opinions on the matter. But hey, that's just my personal opinion.

So, the first thing I looked at were page sizes, both minimum width (the point at which horizontal scroll bars appear) and total height.

Site	Min Width	Height
Rocky Mt. College of Art+Design	795	1619
Skidmore College	805	1105
IUPUI	825	1022
Our Lady of Holy Cross College	825	920
University of St. Thomas	829	812
Biola University	839	1309
Imperial College	875	766
Rice University	925	1084
North Carolina State University	927	1103
Loyola Marymount	950	1052
Portland State University	984	798
Notre Dame University	985	1075
University of Tennessee - Knoxville	985	1085
Cornell College	1006	905
Saxion Universities	1015	950
Denver Seminary	1015	1050
Ball State University	1025	846
Carnegie Mellon University	1029	981
Average	924.4	1026.8

This chart shows things a bit more visually:

Given an average of 20 pixels of horizontal chrome and 120 vertical pixels of browser chrome, effective viewport sizes are about 1000x650 (for 1024x768) and 1260x900 (for 1280x1024).

You can see that there are two width clusters, one around 800 pixels wide, and another around 1000 pixels. You would think that this reflects people designing pages for 800 pixel and 1024 pixel monitors, but all but one of the pages in the ~800 pixel width group are actually more than 800 pixels wide. So, something besides monitor size is driving that width decision.

Also note that with two exceptions, page heights are clustered between 750 and 1100 pixels, which, with browser chrome, is generally more than a screen tall on a 1280x1024 monitor.

At Chico State, Google Analytics show over 40% of users are using monitors of 1024 or fewer pixels width.

Analyzing the Future - Part 1

2007-12-12T15:14:00.000-08:00

Selecting 18 newly redesigned college home pages to analyze for trends in design, navigation, structure, content and technologies.

Today, we finally got 'official' word that the redesign of the Chico State home page is a priority project. That means that within three years we'll have a new home page!

Well-placed sarcasm aside, it's a good time to begin taking a fresh look at what other colleges and universities are doing with their redesigns. Not that we will necessarily want to copy them, but in order to be able to say (with authority), "these are the trends", "this is a common practice", "70% of the sites reviewed are taking this approach".

As some wise person said, "When decisions are based on opinions, he who yells loudest wins." And the point here - as it has been from day one of this blog - is to elevate the discussion above opinions to actual facts based on research (sloppy, biased and subjective research, yes, but still research).

Methodology

I went to the eduStyle.net site and selected redesigned sites to review based on the following criteria:

Site must have been redesigned within the past year
Site must have at least three positive votes ("My style") as of 12/12/07
Site must have more positive votes than negative votes as of 12/12/07
Site must be college or university main home page

I used these criteria because I wanted relatively new home pages that have received a positive response from the eduStyle community. While it's true that many of those people are designers (as opposed to information architects, etc.), I feel that overall, it's a legitimate barometer... and it has the added benefit of removing my personal biases from the selection process.

I ended up with 18 sites that met my criteria:

Over the next week or so, I'll be looking at these home pages from structural, organizational, navigational, design, content, and technological perspectives, looking for trends, best practices, and things that we can out right steal for the new Chico State home page.

Multi-variate Browsing for Booze

2007-11-26T10:49:00.001-08:00

How multivariate "smart browsing" can dramatically enhance the user experience.

I've commented in a previous post about the conceptual tug of war between search and browse on the Web.

Obviously, they both have their place. What I've been noticing lately is that differences in how a site lets you browse through information can have a dramatic impact on the user experience.

Let's take a couple of sites as an example.

Corporate Wines

wine.com

Yes, it's true that these aren't university Web sites, and at Chico State, booze is a sensitive subject. But in my other life, I'm a wine columnist, so I spend a lot of time shopping for (but not necessarily buying) wine.

Let's say that you had a bottle of 2002 Rodney Strong Symmetry and want to buy another. On both sites, you can get to it pretty quickly using the search box (though admittedly, the search function at wine.com is much, much better).

But what if you're looking for a 90+ point Napa Cabernet Sauvignon for under $40?

That sort of multi-variate search can be very difficult to handle via a search box. It's very easy to end up with more noise than signal in the search results. A high functioning browse structure ("smart browsing") can be a better way to go. Let's see how the sites handle it...

First of all, the Corporate Wine site doesn't show wine ratings, so right off the bat you're at a disadvantage. Second, the only thing they let you browse by is region - "California". Once there, you have to slog through 889 wines. At this point, I've already given up.

On the other hand, the wine.com site lets you refine your browsing criteria on the fly by price, type, region and rating. And the type and region filters have multiple levels, so once you select California, you can further refine your browse to only Napa Valley.

In just six clicks, I've narrowed my browse down to Napa Valley Cabs between $20-$40, and sorted them with top rated wines at the top.

I really like the ability to refine my browsing criteria on the fly, and I think wine.com does just about the best job of this of any wine Web site (though Vinfolio is just as good - and has better wines). I only wish that they had a decent wine selection to make it worth visiting their site. They should also add vintage to the list of variables that you can use to refine your browse.

OK, so how does this apply to university Web sites? I'm really not sure. This approach obviously has serious advantages when doing a multi-variate browse (e.g., price, type, region, rating, vintage), but probably has little, if any, advantage on a single-variate browse.

It might have some value where students are trying to browse through program listings. Let's say you're looking for Master's programs in the College of Engineering... in that case, maybe it would be helpful, but I'm not sure that students would be randomly looking for Master's programs.

Regardless, it's worth giving consideration to exactly how browsing your site works, and its worth realizing that browsing can depend on more than just your information architecture. For me, I'm going to stick this in the back of my mind, so that when a situation that would benefit from this approach appears, I'll be able to go, "Ah ha!"

The Carousel of Mystery - Information Visibility on the University of Notre Dame Home Page

2007-11-20T11:15:00.000-08:00

Disturbing trends in information visibility and why I don't like the Flash carousel on the Notre Dame home page.

The University of Notre Dame home page was redesigned last August and was featured last month on the eduStyle Web site.

Notre Dame Home Page

A lot of people like this design, particularly the Flash "carousel" of news. Though overall I think the design is fine, the Flash carousel is exactly the thing about the page I don't like.

It's not that it's particularly badly designed, but it demonstrates a continuing and growing trend in Web development and design toward lower and lower information visibility. In some ways, this is inevitable, as more and more content and links are crammed onto pages, but my personal opinion is that whenever you hide something, you hurt yourself.

So what's my beef with the carousel?

How many features are there?
How do I navigate them?
Are there any that are interesting to me?
Is there any way to know without going through them all?
I'm busy, I don't have time to poke through all these to find something interesting. Why are you making me do this?
In fact, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to ignore it and look for the link I want.

My concern here is that I don't know what information is hidden in the carousel, and I'm not really given sufficient motivation to take the time to explore. I'm not sure that anything is served by this form of presentation. Saving space? Maybe. Enhancing the user experience? Probably not.

You could argue that it's an improvement over the random static feature used on a lot of sites, by providing a number of partially visible features, but I wonder if user testing would show to be much of an improvement.

Better, I think, to have one feature prominent, but have all the other features visible, something like the way Ohio State does it.

That way, I can see all of the features. If the most prominent one doesn't interest me, maybe one of the others will. They certainly won't if I can't see them.

The bottom line to me is: If you hide information, it might as well not exist.

The Future of the University Web Site

2007-11-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

Focusing the university home page to act as a portal to audience-specific "sub-sites", instead of a catch all everything-to-everyone page.

Users' expectations of Web sites has evolved rapidly over the past few years - and continues to evolve. The concept that a "single" Web site can meet the needs of the wide variety of audiences that come to a university Web site is no longer valid. Users expect a tailored experience, designed specifically to meet their needs, address their concerns, and to fit their mental model of the site. No one "all purpose" university Web site can hope to do this - except to do it poorly.

In fact, a university's Web site is not a single site, but instead a collection of a wide variety of sites, each serving specific audiences and specific needs, and each providing a different facet of what the University is. Accounting Operations, the College of Business, and University Housing are each part of the university and the university's Web presence, but each serves a different purpose, addresses a different audience, and meets a different need.

The top level pages in the university Web site (including, of course, the home page) are no different, and should no longer be viewed as a monolithic set of "one size fits all" pages attempting to meet the needs of all users. Instead, the focus should be to provide audience-focused experiences, custom-designed to meet the needs of the main user groups that are likely to visit a university's site. These include the usual suspects of prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, alumni, family, and community members, as well as other groups.

There is no reason that we cannot provide a tailored experience for each of these groups, at least at the top level of pages within the site. And there is every reason why we should this level of experience if the university is to compete for students in the coming years.

How do we do this? By providing a home page designed to allow users to quickly self-identify and self-select themselves. Once a user identifies themselves (by clicking on "Prospective Students" or by clicking on the "Admissions" link, for example), they are taken to a sub-site specifically designed to meet their needs. Of course, it's impossible to fully guess the needs of all users, but prospective students have a very similar set of needs when visiting a university site that can be met by designing a section of the university's Web site to focus specifically on prospective students and de-emphasizes content and links irrelevant to those users.

And I'm not talking about the "clearinghouse" pages that so many universities use where each of the audience pages is simply a list of links. That's the short, easy, thoughtless and bad way out. By doing that, you're not providing each audience with a custom-designed experience; you're telling them that their experience isn't important enough for you to waste time trying to design it. "Here's a bunch of links. Knock yourself out," is about all you're saying.

Users' expectations of the level of experience they should have has increased dramatically over the past few years, and to attract those users to our campus, and to retain them, we have no choice but to meet their expectations.

In the end, we will end up with not one university site at the top level, but a series of sub-sites, each designed for a specific audience with specific common needs and perceptions.

Who is doing this? I'm sure there are a large number of universities (other than Chico State) doing this out there, but I'm just going to list the few I can find that are really investing the effort:

University of Virginia - different main pages for each audience

A couple of interesting posts

2007-10-31T17:18:00.000-07:00

These are a couple of years old, but still worth looking at.

Best University Admissions Web Sites

Best University Web Sites

Michigan State Home Page Photos

2007-10-31T14:43:00.001-07:00

Though I don't really like the MSU home page, I do like what they've done with the photos. By tying people and place in each photo, they connect directly with the viewer and tell a story. And it's nice that actually use some text to link the photos to the story. And, of course, clicking on the photo takes you to the full story.

This is personally how I think home page photos should be done. There is an effective triad of:

People
Place (or context)
Story

that needs to be part of every main home page photo.

I wish we were doing that. Hopefully, as things change and evolve here, we'll start implementing some of these best practices.

A few of the photos I shamelessly stole off their home page...

HighEdWebDev - A Few Thoughts - Part 1

2007-10-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the HighEdWebDev conference in Rochester, NY.

Here are some of my thoughts on some bigger picture issues....

Buzzword of the conference: Social Networking

I wasn't too impressed with social networking as something that we need to get into the middle of. Yes, I think that it's important for university's to be aware of the social networks growing up related to campus, simply to be cognizant of what students and others are saying. However, I don't think there's any reason for Web Services, or any other organization on campus, to get too involved in managing or providing or integrating social networks.

Content Management

Content management remains a big issue. The ad hoc round table that Pat and I hosted was the most well attended of the round tables at the conference.

My main take away was that, because we've had experience with a WCMS before, we have developed a very strong process for evaluating a WCMS. This is something that most of the campuses we talked with have NOT done. They are (as we were) basically stumbling in the dark. They know they need a WCMS, but they don't exactly know how they will use it.

In our round table, we emphasized two things from our experience that we felt we vital in selecting a product that would actually work:

Understand you business processes, no matter how undocumented or dysfunctional they may be.

You have to select a product that is going to work with your existing cultural, organizational structure and business processes.
You dramatically increase the chance of failure if you are forced to change your organization or radically alter your business processes in order to make a WCMS "work".

Never, ever buy anything that you haven't taken the time and effort to learn yourself.

We required vendors to provide us with a sandbox, and we took the time to actually implement templates and content elements in order to build a real live site using our templates and business processes. We then offered a training/demo of the products to the campus community.
From that process, we learned things that no vendor demo or series of vendor demos could teach us.

More thoughts to come on issues such a identity management and using your web presence to compete for new students.

HighEdWebDev - Session Summaries

2007-10-15T19:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a summary of the sessions I attended at the HighEdWebDev conference in Rochester, NY last week. More detailed impressions to come later.

Monday Sessions

These Kids Today:
Usability testing with parents of new students and new students. Parents are slower, read more, but detect BS text faster. Students are fast fast fast, read with their fingers. Even split between searchers and browse-then-search-ers. Don't wait until the end to do usability studies.

The Accessible Video Interface
Great Flash tools for making video interface with captions. Captioning is a lot of work, and the "video better be worth the effort". Like that.

Supporting Web Presence with IT Comm Partnership
Cornell created virtual organization with IT staff dedicated to working on main campus site underneath the Director of Web Communications. They sold the idea of the partnership from bottom up, but obviously, the two directors work well together and have true collaborative relationship. Not sure such a virtual organization would work as well here, but it's possible.

Adding Google Maps
Mostly basic, but showed Geo-coding (based on addresses), and ways to tie into a database. Alumni locations based on Zip code locations and DB of alumni addresses. Way to do a campus map is to store data in DB and generate client-side JS code from that. Easier to maintain and update.

Lessons learned from Redesign and CMS
Used consultants to redesign site for political reasons.

Everything is political

move project buy in as high as possible

Go where the money is

Use the mission statement to cough up money
Recruit money from all benefiting depts and units

Develop your principles before you start
1. scope
2. goals
3. target audience
4. cost
5. timeline
Think of campus and site strategic direction
Think of your infrastructure
1. Do you have the people to support/implement project?
2. Better to out source?
Bus. processes are your problem too
1. bad processes will bite you at every step
Use Web Standards and ADA to your advantage
Develop clear expectations
Get campus on board (fac senate, etc.)
Get Exec committee to sign off on visual design
Conduct usability studies

10 Signs its time to Redesign
Pretty standard stuff
-site's ugly
-content's out of date
-audience has changed, etc.

Tuesday Sessions

Higher Ed Web Development Gets Flattened, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New World Order
Mark Greenfield is at it again with thought provoking ideas about how our jobs will change in the next five years. I wasn't really impressed though. Focus on crowdsourcing, outsourcing, contracting, etc. Interesting tho, the idea that menial stuff will be outsourced so that IT staff can focus on bigger issues. Maybe.

Building a Cohesive Website through a Collaborative Process
U Nebraska at Lincoln
Typical success story - they had buy in from the very top. Pres decided that they needed a unified look and feel and put someone in charge but let them determine what the structure, process and organization would be.

Put together lose network of web "developers" (mostly content editors). Came up with design standard. Developed time line for enforced implementation of standard. A few stragglers, but backed by Pres.

Monitoring Your Web Identity - Jay Collier
Interesting talk about all the different places information about your campus appears on the Web. From news sites to YouTube to blogs, social networking sites, Twitter, etc., etc. And how to use Google Alerts, RSS feeds and other tools to keep track of all of this chatter. Interesting stuff, but time consuming.

The Illusionist: Pulling Web Content out of Thin Air
How to write content for a client Web site when the client gives you no content. Very sad that some people are reduced to this. Pretty basic stuff. Pull stuff out of the catalog. Get print copies of the viewbook. Link to the campus directory. Pathetic that some people have to resort to this.

Google Analytics and Higher Education Web Development
Off the cuff presentation of the basics of Google Analytics. Nothing new here.

Content Management System Round Table
Pat and I hosted this. Interesting to hear other people's experiences. Not too favorable impressions of Collage and Ingeniux from campuses using them. Higher level of success from the few campuses that went to round two and had a better understanding of their needs and processes. Jay Collier expounded on their "one stop" open source solution (name??) that included, wiki, blogs, and all sorts of other tools as well as WCMS. Not the way we want to go. Good reports on Hannon Hill from the people who are using it.

Lost in the Golden Triangle

2007-07-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

A look at a heat map of the CSU, Chico home page and how it measures up.

A couple of years ago, some companies got together and did some research on how users viewed a Google results page using eye tracking heat maps. The results showed a "golden triangle" where users spent the most time looking on the page.

Last year, usability guru Jakob Nielson conducted similar research that indicated that most pages generated an F-shaped heat map.

In reality, the 'golden triangle' and the 'F-shaped' pattern are really the same thing. To a degree, they reflect the organization of textual content on content pages, but they also reflect our "training" to look in the upper left-hand corner of web pages as a starting place because we expect:

To read (or scan) from left to right and top to bottom
To find the most relevant content at the top
To find navigational options at the top and/or left

Of course, usability experts understand this behavior and design pages to take advantage of it, and in the process they reinforce and reward that behavior.

Well, I'm proud to say that we at Chico State are bucking that trend. No Golden Triangles for us!

Our Web Development guys got a free Crazy Egg account and tracked user clicks on several pages, including our home page. Though the free account only gave us a half a day's information, what information it did provide was revealing.

Link	Clicks	Percent
Portal Login	623	31%
Search Chico State	351	17%
WildcatMail	254	13%
MS Exchange Email	181	9%
Class Schedule	73	4%
CSU, Chico Catalog	70	3%
Directory	60	3%

70% of all clicks were on the top four items. The Portal Login alone accounted for nearly 1/3rd of all clicks.

Of course, these top links were all placed in the upper left-hand portion of the page, right? In fact, none of the most commonly clicked on areas were in the golden triangle - or even near it.

Here's a heatmap of our home page from the test:

Even better, here's the heat map without the site overlay:

As you can see, just about the least clicked part of the page is the golden triangle.

The Portal (lower right), search (top right) and email (far right) links are all in non-prime real estate areas of the page.

Nice.

Hopefully, we'll be able to purchase at least a full month's usage of Crazy Egg in order to gather some real data that will further help guide us to better redesign the new home page...whenever that may or may not happen.

Search vs. Browse - Let the Argument Continue!

2007-06-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

Which is "better"? Neither. Both. It depends.

There is research out there (you go find it - I'm too lazy) that suggests that different people have different strategies for finding information on websites. Some people tend to browse while others tend to go straight to the search box.

I thought about this and came to the realization that it's not as simple as that. Viewing my own behavior, I've discovered that I use different information finding behaviors on different websites.

The following are a few examples. What does this have to do with redesigning university home pages? Not much, but we seem to keep arguing about whether searching or browsing is "better", and I thought I'd toss this into the mix.

Digital Photography Review- Generally speaking, I browse this site, except for the forums, which I almost always search for specific topics. Partly I browse because the site lacks a comprehensive search feature, but also because the site is clearly and simply organized.

National Weather Service, Sacramento - I always browse and never use search, mostly because I know where the things I want are and the site is fairly simple.

Amazon.com - I nearly always search if I know what I'm looking for. However, if I don't know the exact thing I'm looking for I'll typically search to the category and then browse from there to the specific item. For example, if I want to see if there are any new wine books out, I'll search for "wine" and then browse the rest of the way.

Wine Library - Again, if I know exactly what I want, I'll search for it. But if I'm just looking for a nice Bordeaux, I'll browse through the listings.

Wikipedia - OK, I admit, I'm one of those people who use Wikipedia and actually believe what they read. In Wikipedia I search exclusively. I'm not even sure if there is a browse feature.

IMDB - Again, exclusively search. Is there any other way in IMDB?

Anthony Dunn Photography - This is my own website. Clients often call and ask what photos I have of this or that and I use my website to see what I have. Depending on what people are looking for, I may browse through the stock photo section of the site or just do a search. I'd say that 70% of the time I use the search box.

CSU, Chico - I had to add this one, but it's not really fair include it. For the most part, I know the URLs of the sites I'm working on, so typically I just type in the URL. I've bookmarked a number of other pages. I pretty much only use the search box for testing and only browse to see if something is findable that way.

Bottom line: On different sites I use a different approach based on my needs and goals and on the capabilities of the site itself.

On sites I'm very familiar with and use the same information over and over, I tend to browse.
On commercial sites where I want to browse the wares, I tend to use a hybrid search/browse approach.
On informational sites, I tend to search for what I'm looking for.

Where would university sites fit in this spectrum? My guess is they would tend toward the informational, and I would probably tend to use search over browse.

The Purpose of the University Home Page

2007-05-29T16:13:00.001-07:00

A very high level overview of the purposes of a university home page.

Why have a home page? I mean, really, who uses it? There's nothing important on it that can't be found elsewhere, and it's just a big political football. Why not just put up a nice 404 page and leave it at that?

OK, OK, I was just kidding (sort of). Your home page is more than just a huge political nightmare. It serves, in fact, a large number of audiences, a large number of purposes, and takes on a lot of different roles.

Let's start of easy with large-scale types of purposes. We can work down to more detail from there.

Branding
Marketing
Communication
Navigation

In his article on Home Page Goals, Derek Powazek echoes some of these four purposes in his four goals:

Answer the question, “What is this place?”
Don’t get in the repeat visitor’s way
Show what’s new
Provide consistent, reliable global navigation

Of course, these four purposes don't exist in a vacuum:

Branding for whom?
Marketing of what to whom?
Communication of what to whom to what end?
Navigation to where for whom?

You have to answer these questions before you should even think about having a home page.

If you have other gross-level purposes, I'd like to hear them.

University Web Services Infrastructures

2007-05-29T09:38:00.000-07:00

A review of how some universities manage their web services organizations.

About three years ago I did a presentation at EduCause about the organization of Web Services and Web Development departments at a variety of universities. Though the examples in the PowerPoint from that presentation may be a bit dated (read: some of the links no longer work), the points and issues I raised in the presentation are still valid.

Here's a link to that original PowerPoint.

The top issues campuses are facing with regard to their web presence:

Identity, Branding & Consistency
- #1 issue at virtually every campus I spoke with
- Greater even than content management
- 87% said visual consistency very important
Decentralized Web Presence
- Even the best campus would rate “poor to hopeless” compared to the worst
  e-commerce site
- SLO
  - Two-year redesign process only affected top two levels of pages
  - Can only “recommend” use of new template to departments
- CSUDH uses “stick” approach
  - Buy-in from the very top
  - “Conform with new template by Dec 15th or have your link pulled from
    the site”
Content Management & Other Systems
- The most consistent campus sites all use an enterprise-level CMS

Based on what I saw being done at other universities, I developed a basic infrastructure outline that could be implemented at most universities, including CSU, Chico:

Permanent advisory/planning committee
- Advises on priorities, future direction, messages and policies
- More strategic in focus than day-to-day
- Typically no specific design authority; may set university branding standards
Administration
- Coordinates between departments
- Runs servers
- Often enforces standards, sets technical standards
- Provides staffing & expertise
Implementation team
- Designs and implements websites and services
- Provides technical expertise
- Enforces standards on sites it implements
- Designers, programmers, developers, information architects, project managers
“Web Users” group
- A way for departmental webmasters to keep up with standards
- Provides an avenue of communication between editors and Implementation Team, Administration and Advisory Committee
- Support group for web editors
- Provide training, troubleshooting

What I think of Our Own Home Page

2007-05-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

OK, now that I've published my home page rubric, how does the Chico State home page measure up to it?

First let me start by saying that I didn't design this page and I'm not responsible for this page.

So here it is:

Standards: 1
Accessibility: 2
Design: 2
Organization: 2
Identity and Branding: 2
Message and Purpose: 1.5
Total Score: 10.5

Considering that these should all be threes, not so good, but not as bad as I imagined.

How about the University of Tennessee at Knoxville home page, which I recently discussed...

Standards: 3
Accessibility: 3
Design: 3
Organization: 3
Identity and Branding: 3
Message and Purpose: 3
Total Score: 18

That's a little more like it.

A Home Page Rubric

2007-05-21T16:14:00.000-07:00

An example rubric for evaluating university home pages.

OK, I admit, I work in an environment where I'm surrounded by instructional designers. I live with a teacher. And I have a Master's degree in Instructional Technology.

And I hate the word "rubric". But teachers and instructional designers love rubrics. They have rubrics for everything. They even have rubrics for evaluating breakfast:

Category	4	3	2	1
Eggs	Soft and moist without being runny.	Not over or under cooked. May be lacking slightly in flavor.	Somewhat dry or runny.	Completely dried out or barely cooked. No flavor at all.
Bacon	Nice and crispy, but not burnt. Incredible flavor.	Good flavor, not overcooked, but perhaps slightly soft.	Somewhat dry and overcooked or too soft and chewy.	Burnt or nearly raw. Poor flavor.
Toast	A nice goldern brown, with a generous layer of melted butter.	Slightly over- or under-cooked.	Toast too dark or too light. Too little butter.	Burnt to a crisp.

Truth to be told, rubrics are very useful, and I'm working on a rubric that I use to informally evaluate university home pages. It uses the following criteria (in no particular order).

Category	3	2	1
Standards	Complies with web standards (CSS layout, XHTML, etc.)	Mostly complies with standards (may have some validation errors)	Does not comply with standards (table-based layouts, etc.)
Accessiblity	Page is designed for accessibility and includes accessibility shortcuts like accesskey and skip to content links	Page meets basic accessibility standards but does not display awareness of real accessibility	Page does not meet basic accessibility requirements
Design	Design is professional and clean and current-looking (Fresno State)	Design is professional, but looks dated or static (San Francisco State)	Page does not look professionally designed (Duke University)
Organization	Page is organized into clear areas, excellent use of white space, callouts, sidebars, etc. to delineate different areas of the page (Virginia Tech)	Page is somewhat well organized. May be somewhat clutteredor empty-looking.	Page is poorly organized, and probably extremely cluttered. May have multiple poorly delineated navigation areas. Page is muddled and 'organized' without clear rhyme or reason.
Identity & Branding	Page communicates a clear and consistent identity and branding of the institution that carries through to other pages.	Identity and branding are present, but may not be consistent through the site or even top level pages.	Branding and identity are not clear or not present on the site. There is little to distinguish the institution from others.
Message and Purpose	Page communicates a clear focus of message and purpose. Content and links relate clearly and directly to that focus. Extraneaous content that does not fit within the purpose of the page (often motivated by politics) is not present.	Page communicates some focus of purpose and message but may contain extraneous or politically motivated content.	Page is a hodge-podge of content with no clear purpose or message. User comes away not knowing what the site is trying to say or who it is directed to.

Please feel free to write be with your ideas or comments. I think there are probably a few things that could be added to this rubric, or at least some refinements. I'd like your input.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

2007-05-21T14:35:00.000-07:00

The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has a very nice home page. At least, I think so.

What makes it successful to me?

Very clean, up-to-the-moment design, with good use of white space to chunk the page.
Prominent navigation area. Main navigation components are not spread around the page.
Relatively unobtrusive use of Flash that provides a level of interactivity.
Nice, relatively engaging people photos in prominent location. Not too big, but eye-catching. Unfortunately, they seem a bit generic to me. I can see pohotos of college students anywhere. Show me something unique about your school.
Clearly deliniated audience-oriented navigation. It's part of the main navigation but effectively set apart by the orange background. Smart and effective.
Effective use of news and events. I like the RSS feeds and even (gasp!) the icons they use on the home page.
The design and layout are all CSS and web standards-based. Very clean.
Nice use of access keys. A very accessible page.
All of the top level pages stick to the home page template. Maybe a bit too slavishly for my taste, but much better than the usual alternative of total design chaos.

What don't I like? Not too much.

The Top 40 University and Apply Now! sections don't stand out sufficiently. I'd suggest getting rid of Apply Now! and increase the size and prominence of the Top 40 University section. Use colors or a callout to make this section stand out more.
I like the idea of a "Future" section on the home page. We've had that discussion here, and I think showing the direction that the university is headed in the future is a great idea. Oh, wait, that isn't what this is. This is only a bunch of links to the UT system. Pffft. We're wasting space on the home page for this?

You could do a lot worse than this as a home page.

This redesign was implemented in February 2007 and had five goals (thanks for a. - having goals, and b. - sharing them with us!):

To bring the site into conformity with the recommendations of the W3C, making the site more accessible
To better leverage dynamic content through the use of RSS feeds and an events calendar
To improve navigation based upon data collected by tracking actual use of the site
To better represent, visually, the vitality of life on the UT Knoxville campus
To build a clear and compelling brand identity for the University of Tennessee

Interesting mix of user-oriented and marketing-related goals. Good job folks!

University Home Page Audiences

2007-05-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

In this post, Georgina Hibberd states that the first step to an effective university home page is to "identify your audiences and place them in a hierarchy of importance."

OK, I'll buy that. So who are your potential audiences? I'll start a list, and then the three people who read this blog can pick it apart. Most of these audience groups are obvious, but it's always good to put them out there.

Prospective students
Current students
Former students (mostly alumni)
International Students (important for some campuses)
Faculty
Staff and Administration
Faculty, staff and administrators from other universities
Job seekers (both faculty and staff)
Parents (of current and prospective students)
Community members (town residents, local businesses, governmental, etc.)
Prospective community members (people thinking of moving to the area)
Partners (business partners, granting organizations, etc.)
Media (you don't think that Virginia Tech's home page wasn't pounded by the media?)
Donors
"Friends" and "Visitors" (whatever that means) - from this post
Web developers from other universities looking for inspiration for their own home page redesign

These aren't in any specific order, though they generally get less significant as you go down the list. Different people on campus will definitely rank these groups differently in importance. Personally, I don't think that it's important to fight over whether community members are more important that business partners, but I do think that it's important to rank the top 4 or 5 audience groups and state specifically why they are so important to you.

Got any significant audience groups to add? Let me know. But I think I've covered the main bases.

University Home Pages: A Thankless Task?

2007-05-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed this blog about what makes a good university home page and what to look at in designing it: University Home Pages: a thankless task?

To summarize:

What makes a good university homepage?

Clear pathways to further information
An uncluttered interface that serves only the users, not the wishes of every group on campus with a website that wants a link.
Clear and consistent branding
Pleasing graphic design that appeals to the largest target audience group of the page without alienating other groups completely

How to design a homepage:

Identify your audiences and place them in a hierarchy of importance
Develop a clear idea as to why these audiences are coming to the site and prioritise their tasks
Reflect the strategic goals of the university while illustrating an image of the University
Wrap it all in a graphic design which appeals to your largest user base, while not alienating other small user groups

Virtual Tours

2007-03-12T16:11:00.000-07:00

A review of "virtual tours" - good and bad - on various university websites.

Boy, there are some lame virtual tours out there. A lot of campuses seem to think that a page with links to a few QuickTime VRs constitutes a virtual tour.

To be fair, whether or not a virtual tour is a "good" virtual tour depends on what the goal of the tour is. Is the "tour" supposed to be a real tour - that is, a guided exploration of important places and things on campus? Is it intended to be used to market the beauty of the campus? Is it intended to simply orient prospective visitors to the layout of campus?

Before embarking on creating a "virtual tour", I think you really need to answer the question of what the tour is supposed to accomplish. Only then can you say if it's a "good" tour or not.

That said, I looked at a lot of virtual tours, and picked out a few that I thought were well done.

UC Merced
I liked their's mostly because it was simple and clean. Menu - picture - text. Can't get any easier than that. On the other hand, I didn't think the tour really told me that much about the campus or region. Maybe it was too simple.

UC Davis
A lot of effort obviously went into the UC Davis tour, and it's obviously directed at prospective students. It provides a fair amount of information about Davis and the campus in a nicely designed format.

A couple of quibbles:
If you need to spell out "click photos >>" then you've got a usability problem - people don't recognize the little photos as navigation. Put left and right arrows next to the main photo.

Also, I'm starting to get a bit tired of generic "college life" photos. The guy in the cafeteria with a plate of food could be anywhere. Instead of the generic, try to focus on the different, the special and the unique. Prospective students will look at dozens of campus sites. They'll see lots of generic photos of campus life. You want to stand out, so you need to focus on what makes your campus different, special and unique.

University of Oregon
What I liked about this tour is that it was set up as an actual tour, with a starting points, sights along the way, and an ending point. However, inside the tour, the order didn't seem to make any difference. I liked the photos and the videos, but I wish the site had been more responsive.

University of Florida
Oh how the mighty have fallen. I loved their Google-based campus map, but this tour is both lame and annoying. The sound effects are terrible. I do like the interactive map, but I don't like how only some parts are clickable and I don't like that it has to load a new page to show info on the place you clicked on.

Yale University
Yale's tour is actually a number of different things. It has an "atlas", which is like an overview map (not too dissimilar from Humboldt's). But it also has a season-based photo slide show, a page on the numbers of international students (why that goes here, I don't know), QuickTime VR panoramas, notable graduates, a comic, and an almost endless list of other stuff.

I like the idea of the tour being more than one piece, but this isn't a "tour", it's a "hodgepodge". Some things obviously belong, but others generate a bit of a "huh?" factor. Also, the endless scrolling menu must be put to death.

Lewis University
Like a more focused version of the Yale "tour" Lewis University has combined a "virtual campus" and a "guided tour" into a single presentation. Very cool 3D campus map. Other than that, it could be a lot more effective where you are in the guided tour and why you should care.

Fresno Pacific University
Oddly, far and away the best tour was by this small Christian university that I'd never heard of before. I really liked the choice of tour guides with their different approaches and personalities. These guides were videos of different students talking about each place/activity on campus. They even had Spanish and Russian versions.

I loved the layout of the tour, broken into four components: a very nice and detailed zoomable map, a QuickTime VR of your location, a brief text description, and a 30-60 video of your tour guide talking about the location.

Extremely informative and well done. My only gripes are that there are dozens of hot spots on the map which are invisible by default (you can change that), and that the map doesn't highlight your current location. When you start the tour, you have no idea where you are on the map.

Of course, creating something like this would be a major effort, from creating the maps to scripting and shooting the videos of the tour guides. Kudos for expending the effort!

What I like in a Virtual Tour

A responsive tour. I hate slow tours that take forever to load.
An interactive tour. I like to control my browsing experience, not have it fed to me with no choices.
An integrated approach. A tour should be more than just some QuickTime VRs. Text, maps, VRs, photos, videos - all can be effective parts of a tour.
An organized approach. Provide a real guided tour, don't just drop people on campus.
Free exploration. Drop me on campus and let me explore. So, yes, I want both options in a virtual tour: guide me when I want to be guided, and let me explore when I want to go off on my own.
Always having a map visible
Relevant and interesting information
A focus on what makes the campus/region different, special and unique ("DSU")
VR panoramas. OK, I admit, I like these when they're well done. Nothing else gives you that 360 degree "you are there" view of a location.

Campus Maps

2007-03-12T11:35:00.000-07:00

A review of good and bad campus maps on various university websites.

As part of the redesign we're doing for the College of Business, we're developing a virtual tour, something similar to the "Explore" page on the new Humboldt State.

So, we're in the market for interactive maps. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I always prefer to steal from others, so I took a look at several dozen campus maps to see what I liked and what I didn't like. Though this project isn't going to be a campus map per se, I thought I'd start there to see how campuses are handling them in useful ways.

Humboldt State University
Their map was the inspiration for what we're doing, so obviously we like it. I like the scalability of the map and the fact that it highlights things of interest. It also has a smooth functionality. I don't like the way it zooms in very much (it moves the center of the map) and I feel that the campus map doesn't really provide much detail or useful information - but then, that's not it's purpose. However, great execution and very nice to look at.

Ohio State University
The only things I really like about this is that the map is very nice looking and I like the photos.

UCLA
UCLA has done an interesting map. I like the rollover interactivity, the photos and the graphic design of the map, but otherwise it doesn't really stand out.

University of Florida
This is my favorite overall. I like the Google Maps implementation, mostly because the Google Maps interface is flexible and easy to use. I like the overlay map, the layers of placemarks, the search ability, etc. I also like that the map scales in detail as you zoom in and out. Personally, I think this is the easiest to use, most flexible and most informative campus map I encountered. The only thing I didn't like was that the panoramas and webcams opened in a separate window instead of the pop-up balloons on the map. I also thought that the UF overlay wasn't very attractive, but that could be fixed.

UC Riverside
I thought this map was ugly and clunky, but I did like how they implemented layers on the map (though the "OFF" buttons were not intuitive).

Kansas State University
I liked the rollover effect and the oblique view used. Otherwise, nothing special.

Santa Clara University
I liked the zoomable map and the photos that appear on the side, but I didn't like having to double-click. That wasn't intuitive.

Arizona State University
Another Google Maps implementation. Not as nice or as informative as the UF map, but still better than most.

What I Like in a Campus Map

Quick response (many maps were slow or had to load a separate page when you zoomed in)
Detailed zoom control with easy to use controller with feedback (e.g., Google Maps)
"Grab and pan" control for panning map (like Google Maps)
Switchable custom data layers to show/hide information
Attractively designed maps (many maps were crude or used ugly colors)
Clear to read and clearly labeled maps (many were difficult to read)
Photos of buildings (seeing a square on a map doesn't help you recognize the building on the ground)

The UF map meets virtually all of these requirements.

Audience-Oriented Links - "Prospective Students"

2007-01-29T09:38:00.000-08:00

Part 1 in a look at what's behind audience-oriented links.

In my Analysis of Navigational Links on Top 20 Home Pages, I discovered that 75% of the sites had a navigational menu devoted to audience groups (e.g., prospective students, current students, faculty, alumni, etc.) and 90% at least had a link for at least "Alumni".

Obviously, audience-oriented navigation is popular. But what is behind those links? What services and information are sites directing these audiences to?

This is the first in a series of posts exploring the links behind the audience-oriented menus.

Prospective Students

As I discovered in a previous post, "prospective students" is not a universal label. Of the 12 sites with a link to this audience group, 9 used the label "prospective students" and 3 used "future students". I personally like "future students" better, but mostly because it's shorter and would fit in a smaller space.

Methodology and Results

I clicked on the "Prospective Students" link and inventoried the links unique to that page, ignoring global navigation links that were also found on other pages. Here's the results (links that appeared on 3 or more sites):

Link	Total	Percent
Graduate Admissions	11	92%
Undergraduate Admissions	9	75%
Financial Aid	7	58%
International Students	7	58%
Visiting/Visitor Center	6	50%
Continuing Education	5	42%
Distance/Online Learning	5	42%
Transfer Students	5	42%
Academics	4	33%
Apply Online	4	33%
Campus Map	4	33%
Freshmen	4	33%
Summer Academic Programs	4	33%
Directions	3	25%
Housing	3	25%
Campuses	3	25%

Conclusions

Eh. Mostly pretty boring and typical stuff. Come on people! Do something engaging and interesting! This is the page where students who are shopping for a university go first. This page should really grab them and offer a persuasive argument why your university is THE ONE they want. After all, these students may be looking at dozens of other university sites. You have to do something that stands out.

And honestly, for the most part, none of the 12 sites that I looked at did. But a few are doing some vaguely interesting stuff.

Utah State has a link to campus webcams (though the image is lame).

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Colorado both had links to virtual tours. Unfortunately, UIUC's wasn't even an actual virtual tour. UC's was better, but used pop-up windows (annoying) and only featured a few locations. I'll do an entire post on virtual tours some time soon.

Today's prospective students are pretty technologically savvy and used to social networking applications like MySpace and Facebook, as well as self-publishing tools such as blogs, photo sharing sites, as well as video-sharing sites like Youtube. Today's universities need to be making good use of these technologies, particularly on the pages that prospective students are most likely to visit.

Recommendations: Stand out from the Crowd

So what things can you do to attract prospective students and stand out from the crowd?

Use student blogs to personalize your school
Use videos to communicate your people and your place (post them on YouTube as well)
- Campus Tours
- Student Life
- Community Attractions
- Lectures and seminars
- Concerts and performances
Used geotagged photos in Flickr or Panoramio to show the beauty of your campus or location
Create virtual tours in Google Earth to familiarize people with your area (Here's an example - you'll need Google Earth installed. Choose "Tools", "Play Tour" to play the tour. You may have to adjust your tour settings to slow it down a bit. All place marks in the tour have photos attached.)
- Campus Tours
- Restaurants, Cultural Attractions
- Local Landmarks
Use podcasts like blogs and videos to personalize your school and to communicate the people and place
Use Facebook groups and online forums to personalize your school and to reach out to prospective students
Use IM to chat with prospective students live

Not all of these might be appropriate for your campus, but prospective students are going to be using these tools to learn about your campus. Even though you can no longer control the message, at least you can be part of it.

Perfect Home Page Photos - Part 2

2007-01-17T16:47:00.001-08:00

An excruciating examination of each of the photos I chose for my mock up site.

In Perfect Home Page Photos - Part 1, I discussed tips to effective home page photos and provided a link to a mock up home page where you could view a variety of different photos.

Please view the Hypothetical State University mockup to see the photos in action.

In this post, I'm going to discuss the choice of photos in a bit more detail. First, I'd like to break down the photos into several categories:

Scenic Photos
- Campus Buildings & Environment
- Campus - Past & Future
- Local Natural Environment
People-oriented Photos
- Local Community & Activities
- Academic Programs
- Faculty Accomplishments
- Student Accomplishments
- Sports
- Students Engaged in Activities
- Diversity

I was able to find effective, high quality examples of most of these types of photos.

Scenic Photos

Campus Buildings & Environment
Effective photos of campus buildings and the natural environment of the campus serve the purpose of highlighting the beauty of the campus setting and the uniqueness of its buildings. Many campuses have outstanding old buildings in park-like settings, and this can be exploited to communicate a beautiful and secluded academic environment.

Text associated with such photos should stress the outstanding characteristics of the campus plant, such as the number of acres the campus comprises, the age of the buildings, the age of the plantings, any awards or recognition the campus or its buildings have received, notable architects, unique buildings or building characteristics, etc.

Examples
This photo shows off the nice architectural detail of the campus. Coming up with a story to link to might be difficult, but a page of photos of the building wouldn't be inappropriate.

This photo shows off the beauty of the campus's natural environment. Linking to a story about Big Hypo Creek would be appropriate.

This photo gives a wider view of a campus building. This isn't my favorite photo, but it was the best I had. Linking to a story on the history of the campus wouldn't be completely inappropriate.

Campus - Past and Future
Past and future images of the campus can serve to place it in context. Older campuses in particular can benefit from highlighting their illustrious past. Photos of original buildings, the first graduating class, etc., can be effective. However, students tend to be less interested in the past and more interested in the future. Computer-generated images of planned buildings, if of high quality, can be effective in communicating how future-oriented the campus is.

Text associated with photos of the past should focus on generalities like how long the campus has been in existence rather than on specific past events (which may be of little interest to anyone).

Examples
I'm not very fond of this photo, but it was one of the few that I could find that would fit into the photo space. A link to a history of the campus would be appropriate.

This high quality 3D CGI works well on the home page and shows the future direction of the campus. Linking to a story about the new building or to a web cam showing the construction of the building would be appropriate.

Local Natural Environment
Almost all students are interested in the local natural environment of their potential new home. Images of state and national parks, unique natural features, rivers, mountains, forests, etc., can give them an idea of the beauty of the area.

Text associated with the photos should focus on the outstanding characteristics of the local natural environment, such as national parks, acres of public forest and recreation facilities, outdoor activities, etc.

Examples
This photo shows off the natural beauty of the region. Linking to an article about the preserve would be appropriate.

Another photo highlighting the natural beauty of the region. Linking to an article on the National Park would be appropriate.

Yet another photo. Linking to a photo essay on local wildflowers would be appropriate.

People-Oriented Photos

Local Community and Activities
As with the local natural environment, students are very interested in the local community where their prospective school is located. Photos of local events and locales such as art galleries, arts performances, farmers markets, city scenes, nightlife, etc. can be effective tools for communicating a lively and involved community offering lots of activities to students. Rural campuses may need to stress more outdoor activities instead of nightlife and arts.

Text associated with the photos should stress the number of activities available in the community and any unique activities that may exist.

Example
This photo shows a scene of a community activity. Linking to an article on the farmer's market would be appropriate.

Academic Programs
It's perfectly acceptable to try to stress the outstanding nature of a university's academic programs, but unfortunately, it's a subject that does not lend itself easily to dramatic or interesting photos. Most photos will tend to be rather generic images of faculty teaching or students looking on intently.

As a result, most of the interest will have to be generated by the text. Focusing on specific programs that have received some sort of recognition, or that have some unique characteristic is probably the best approach. Generic references to a university's program will garner little interest from students (e.g., "HSU's outstanding academic programs are known throughout the country."), instead focus on specific, quantifiable measurements of academic quality (e.g., "Forty-seven percent of HSU graduates go on to pursue post-graduate degrees.").

Examples
Though this photo doesn't include people, it does have the potential to generate interest, partly by being so unusual for a university home page. A link to a story about the program would be appropriate.

This photo generates interest primarily because the people in the photo are attractive, smiling young women, looking directly at the camera. The story is mostly an excuse to include "smiling women" type photos. Obviously, a link to a story about the post-graduate educational habits of students would be appropriate.

Faculty Accomplishments
Highlighting faculty accomplishments, research, awards, and publications can be an effective tool for highlighting academic excellence on campus. Of course, research universities are more likely to have a lot of faculty accomplishments to focus on. Internal awards, such as "Faculty of the Year" should be avoided. Students are comparing your school against others, and as a result, internal awards become meaningless.

As with academic programs, the photos themselves may tend to be rather bland - photos of faculty staring at the camera or engaged in their research. Again, most of the interest will have to be generated by the text. Text should focus on specific accomplishments (e.g., "Professor Tom Jones received a $5.5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control to study the spread of West Nile virus", not general statements like "Professor Tom Jones is one of the most published faculty on campus".

Examples
I had a difficult time finding faculty photos that were interesting and that would fit in the space. This is a location photo, showing the faculty member in class, is probably more interesting than a straight studio shot. A link to the American Studies program or a link to a story about the program would be appropriate.

This photo, though a studio shot, is interesting because of the pose and the fact that the person is looking directly at the camera. A link to an article on the faculty member would be appropriate.

Student Accomplishments
Student accomplishments are plentiful at virtually every university, but too often go overlooked. Everything from academic achievements (prestigious scholarships) to competitions are good subjects for photos. Of course, action-oriented subject like solar car races are preferable, but that isn't always possible.

So again, the text may have to generate the interest in the topic. And, as usual, the subject should focus on specific, quantifiable accomplishments like "Student newspaper received Best of Show award at the 2006 National College Media Convention".

Examples
Another smiling coed shot. Smiling students are always a plus, as long as you can tie the photo to something specific. In this case, a story about the sorority and its award would be appropriate.

A somewhat nice studio shot - oops! - cut someone out of the photo. Oh well. I would prefer a different kind of photo than this, but once again, smiling students looking at the camera are effective. A link to a story about the "Weekly Potato Bug" staff and their award would be appropriate.

This was the only photo I actually stole from the Internet. I like this one because the abstract is so dynamic, high tech-looking and attention-getting. And it fits well with the story. Dynamic, interesting photos like this are the key to getting people's attention. And, yes a story about the solar car would be appropriate.

Sports
For some universities sports provides a fertile ground for showcases the campus's accomplishments. As with other areas, sports photos should focus on specific, measurable accomplishments, such as winning a regional or national championship, breaking specific records, etc.

Example
I didn't have access to many good sports photos, but this one is dynamic and effective. Sports are popular, but shouldn't be over done.

Students Engaged in Activities
These could be anything, from on-campus life to off-campus recreation (hiking, rafting, etc.). The point is that these should be action-oriented photos of active students.

I didn't have any good photos of students engaged in activities, but you can find several on the Humboldt State University home page.

Diversity
Racial and cultural diversity are important issues at many universities, and some make sure to display that diversity on their home page.

I didn't have access to any good photos showing racial or cultural diversity.

Instant Gold Mine

2007-01-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

A list of University "Web Services" pages.

I'm beginning to look into processes and infrastructures for conducting university home page redesigns. Out of curiosity I did a Google search on "web services site:.edu".

One page that came up was this one: http://fanghorn.ws.utk.edu/ws/, which lists dozens of university web services home pages, as well as style guides, mission statements, policies and other goodies.

This alone will keep me busy for quite a while.

I love those instant Internet gold mines!

I'll add a few to that list, some good, some not so good (and some that are updated links to universities in that list):

Perfect Home Page Photos - Part 1

2007-01-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

Some tips on making the best use of photos on your site's home page.

In one of my last posts, I talked about what I liked in the way of photos on a university home page. Not just what kinds of photos, but their quality, usage, purpose, what they communicate, whether or not they tell a story, link to a story or say something unique about the campus.

In that spirit, I've decided to put together a list of characteristics of the perfect home page photo implementation.

All photos will be of uniformly superior quality, and taken by professional photographers
The photo space will be large enough to catch and hold the viewer's attention
The photo space will have an interesting and/or dynamic shape, and it will be integrated with the home page's graphic design
All photos will have captions that describe the image and provide context
All photos must communicate something unique about the university. Generic photos of students studying, faculty pointing to a white board, etc., say nothing about the unique nature or character of the institution if left without a context. Play to your strengths; pick out things that make your university unique, like:
- The natural setting, local community and regional environment
- The physical plant (building, facilities, labs)
- Notable faculty (Nobel Prize winners, award winning authors, etc.)
- Unique research
- Student accomplishments (sports, academic achievement, other honors and competitions)
Photos should focus on the specific, not the general. For student and faculty accomplishments, the captions/stories should focus on specific, quantifiable accomplishments.
Photos should provide a mix of subject matter; approximately 50% scenic (campus buildings, local environment) and 50% people oriented (faculty, students, research).
Photos should link to stories providing further information on the subject of the photo.
Photos should randomly change with each visit to the home page, or
If an animation is used, viewers should have complete control to stop, go to the next photo or go to the previous photo (see the FSU site).
There should be a sufficient number of different photos to catch the viewer's interest and provide variety.

The perfect home page photo might look something like this (design stolen wholesale from the University of Michigan Web site):

Go to this page and refresh to see different photos. Note that I worked with the photos I had; many other potentially better possibilities exist.

In my next post, I'll talk in more detail about the photos I selected and why.

Home Page Photos: Some Sites That I Like

2007-01-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

A few sites that are using photography effectively on their home pages.

In my life outside of Chico State I'm a professional photographer. My work focuses on landscapes and some architecture, so obviously I have a bias toward scenics. But my work as a web developer and information architect forces me to look a little beyond that at not only the quality of the photography, but also at how well it is used and how appropriately it communicates.

In a previous post, I looked at the types of photography used on campus home pages. In this post, I'm just going to talk about what I like as both a photographer and as an information architect.

Humboldt State University
Humblodt State has done a great job on their home page photos, and I like them for several reasons.

The photos are all of professional quality and very clean
Many photos feature people in the environment and focus on the environment - a big draw at Humboldt
All photos have captions/teasers that are designed more to pique the interest than to provide information
All photos link to short stories building on the photo's teaser
Each story has a link to display all photos and stories

What I don't like:

No photos of the campus. I have no idea if the humboldt campus is great or a dump
Some photos feel a bit generic since most photos aren't about specific people

University of Wisconsin
I like the University of Wisconsin home page for a number of reasons.

The quality of the photos is superior
The photo space is large enough to catch and hold the attention
The photos are captioned, so you know what you're looking at
The photos provide a good mix of environment, people and academics
The photos give a great feel for the environment of the UWisc campus
Most of the photos are unique and relevant, telling a bit of the story of the campus through the environment and the people

What I don't like:

The photos don't link to stories about the photos
Some of the photos (e.g., dorm life and graduating students) are too generic and could be from any university

University of Michigan
I like the University of Michigan for somewhat different reasons.

The panoramic photo space almost becomes a graphic design element
Quality of the photos is excellent
The abstract quality of the images provides a strange sense of intimacy, like looking at the campus through a peephole.
Most of the photos manage to convey a sense of uniqueness in the environment

What I don't like:

Not enough photos
No links to stories or links to a greater view
No people in the environment
No captions describing what we are looking at

Utah State University
I also like Utah State University, though at the time of this writing they've replaced their rotating photos with a single photo congratulating Fall graduates.

Interesting photos on a variety of topics, from research (Cool! The space shuttle!), to students to the campus environment.
Photos have captions/teasers and link to stories
the photo space is large and prominent
Most photos convey something unique about USU or its environment

What I don't like

Photo quality varies
Not enough different photos

University of Connecticut
The University of Connecticut has some great photos.

Superior photo quality
Photos have captions
Most photos show something unique or tell a story about the school
Nice mix of campus, and people photos

Things I don't like:

Users have no control over the animation to stop, speed up or go back
Photos aren't linked to stories

Here a few that are OK, but have specific things I don't like.

University of Montana: Incredible location, some great photos, but photo quality varies widely, photo space is a boring square that has not been integrated into the graphic design.
Washington State University: Good photos with captions, but too small; photos clash with bright colors in the design.
University of Wyoming: OK photo quality, good captions, but too small.
Vanderbilt University: Generic photos, indifferent photo quality, awkward boxy photo space.
New York University: Too many photos, mostly generic, no context or story with any photos.
Duke University: Boxy, generic photos of indifferent quality, and you don't know that there are actually captions until you click on them.
Cornell University: Superior quality photos, plenty big; the only problem is that clicking on any of them takes you to the university mission statement. Huh?

More Bad Interaction Design - University of Vermont

2006-12-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

Part something in a continuing series about bad interaction design on university home pages.

OK, more nitpicking. Take a look at the University of Vermont home page. Mouse over the black and white photo. Kewl. It slides over to reveal a story. I don't really have a problem with that, though I wouldn't do it that way.

My problem is elsewhere. Look above the photo, just to the right of "University of Vermont". What does "✓FULL MEDIA" mean? Is it just a piece of system status information? Is it a link?

Ah! When you click on it, it changes to "✓ LOW MEDIA" and the Flash animation is replaced by a static image. Oh...so "Full Media" really meant "High Bandwidth" and "Low Media" meant "Low Bandwidth". Why didn't they say so?

But what's this? If I click on it again it changes to "✓ TEXT ONLY" and just text is displayed instead of the image.

Cool!!! Or is it?

Not really. Why? Because I really had no idea that it was a link at first. And clicking on it didn't really function as we would expect a checkbox to operate. There is a well-defined and consistent checkbox metaphor on most Operating Systems. Checkboxes are supposed to be checked or unchecked but the options aren't supposed to change. This checkbox violates that model by leaving the box always checked but changing the option. That's wrong. You shouldn't mess with metaphors that people understand.

In addition, I had no idea what the options were. Once I clicked on it, I figured that it was just a toggle between high and low bandwidth. I had no idea that there was a further option. That's poor communication on their part.

How to Fix It
They have a couple of options.

Ditch the Flash animation. Stick with the static photos
Don't use a checkbox metaphor unless people can see the options and the box is going to function according to the standard metaphor
Show all the options. Perhaps moving it to the lower right-hand corner of the photo.
Change the words to match familiar terms: "Full Media" to "High Bandwidth", etc.

Moral of the Story

Don't use Flash animation unless it really adds something to the content.
Don't mess with metaphors people understand. It confuses and frustrates them
Don't hide options or people won't know what choices they have
Use terminology that people are familiar with

Here's one relatively unobtrusive idea, but certainly not the only - or even best - one. Notice that it uses radio buttons instead of checkboxes to be consistent with standard OS interface widgets.

Where's the Branding?

2006-12-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

A good example of bad site branding.

OK, you have five seconds to tell me what school this is. Go!

Come on, folks! You really need to hit people over the head with your branding. Prospective students are going to look at dozens, maybe hundreds of college and university sites. Yours needs to be clearly identified and memorable.

What school is this? You have five seconds to tell me! Oh...you didn't need even half a second, because the home page screams the school's name. Or at least, it screams the name of the state the school is in.

MECA is a tiny little school with no where near the name recognition that the University of Wisconsin has. They need to make a greater impression with their name and brand that UWisc does - by far! So why hide their name? Dare I suggest that an artist and not a Web designer designed the site? Perhaps that's unfair, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Cool Home Page Stuff - Student Blogs

2006-12-14T13:43:00.000-08:00

A brief discussion of using student blogs on your home page.

On this last day before Christmas break (oh man, do I need it), I thought I'd start a recurring post on cool stuff universities are doing on their home page. This is just my opinion (and as we all know, I don't know jack), so feel free to ignore or deride it. I'm stealing most of this stuff from collegewebeditor.com anyway.

Student Blogs

OK, these are university-sponsored student blogs, and so have some strings attached. Typically, students are compensated and there are often rules about not bashing professors by name or writing in gory details about the underage kegger/orgy that took place Saturday night.

A lot of schools have sponsored student blogs, but not that many feature them on their home page.

The value of sponsored student blogs are several:

Students are blogging anyway, so you might as get involved and have at least a little control over the message.
Prospective students are very tuned into social networking on the web, and getting the direct perspective of other students is highly valuable.
Blogs personalize your Web presence, and can make your site appear more personal, friendly and honest.

The downsides include:

Picking the right students with the commitment to post regularly
Maintaining control over the message (at least to the point of preventing explicit or inappropriate posts)
Cost. Students are usually compensated, often with digital cameras and such that they use to maintain their blogs

Some sites, like Capital University, allow people to subsribe to the blogs, so that they can easily follow what's happening on campus over time.

Overall, most campuses that have used student blogs as a recruiting device have been very happy with the result.

Links

Home Page Branding Photos/Spotlight Stories

2006-12-13T13:28:00.000-08:00

An examination of how the main photo area on the home page is used.

In looking at the home pages of the Top 20 university sites, I kept looking at the main photo area of the pages. Though some of these pages may have many photos on them, there is virtually always a "main" photo prominently placed on the home page (see graph, below).

And, of course, I was supposed to look at that main photo. That's what it's there for: to catch and hold the viewer's attention. And as you can see, most universities give the most important real estate on the page to these photos.

So, guessing that it might be important, I decided to take a look at exactly what universities were doing with these photos.

First of all, I decided to add 10 universities to my list of the top 20. I guess I'm just getting bored with the same old 20 home pages. These were randonly picked out of the Google search results, somewhere on page 6 or 7. The additional 10 are as follows:

All of the 30 sites had some sort of main photo area, even if it was relatively small. Of the 30 home pages, 7 (23%) were using a Flash-based animation for the main photo area. Twenty (67%) of the sites had photos that randomly changed, either as part of the Flash animation or upon refreshing the page. Six sites (20%) had photos that only changed periodically (once a day, once a week, etc.).

Twenty-three (77%) sites included at least some text with the photo, ranging from a short caption to a story headline and/or teaser. Half of the sites tied the photos to some sort of feature article or spotlight story, and even more put a link with the main photo area (67%). Those sites that were not using the main photos for a feature or spotlight linked to a variety of things, from a slide show of the campus to a mission statement to a eCard builder.

Photos of What?

The subject of the photos also varied, with some campuses focusing heavily on faculty and research and others more evenly spread out between faculty, students, etc.

Totals in the above graph don't equal 100% because most sites had changing photos that featured multiple subjects.

Of the 15 sites that used the main photo area for links to features/spotlights, 12 (80%) had photos of research or faculty. Only seven (47%) had photos/stories of students.

Of the 15 sites that did not use the main photo area for links to features/spotlights, 11 (73%) had photos of campus scenes (environment, buildings, etc.) and only 3 (20%) had photos of research or faculty.

People or Scenics?

On our campus, there is some discussion of what the ratio of people photos vs. campus/nature photos should be. The "consensus" (i.e., two people threw out that number) is that 3 to 1 is proper.

In order to see what other universities were doing, I tried to look at every photo on the sites (19 of the 30) that had randomly rotating photos (as opposed to photos that only changed daily). I broke down the photos into categories where the photos were primarily of people, primarily of the campus (though people may be in the photo), scenics (areas not on campus), sports and other (most commonly art or research oriented).

The results were as follows:

As you can see, people-oriented photos are only slightly more common than photos of the campus. If you add the sports-oriented photos to the people photos, the gap widens a bit. But overall, there is a fairly even balance between campus/scenic photos and people/sports photos.

To me, this makes sense. I never had any desire to visit the University of Wisconsin or the University of Montana until I saw just how beautiful their campuses and environs were - as revealed by the photos on their home pages. CSU, Chico has both a beautiful campus and a beautiful setting; those should be exploited in attracting prospective students to visit the campus.

Home Page Flash I Don't Like - UCLA

2006-12-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

A look at a flash implementation at UCLA that isn't bad, but doesn't give the user enough control.

I'm not feeling so good today, and that makes me hate every Web site I see, so today I'm going to complain about Flash on university home pages. I know, yesterday I was all peaches and cream about the FSU home page, and I still like what FSU has done, but today I feel like whining.

Let's start with UCLA's home page. Overall, I really like the look of the UCLA home page. It's very clean. And their use of Flash isn't totally gratuitous. But there are a few things. First of all, what's with the "'Tis the season to be mellow"?? What a waste of real estate! Sure, stress management is important... but not on the home page of a major university!

But my main issue is with the Flash-based "Happenings" on the right side of the page. First of all, there really isn't anything to indicate that these are changable. Yes, there are up and down arrows, but they don't really scream "interaction" to me.

And then, if you do try to click them, they don't act quite as you'd expect an arrow button to work. In fact, you can't click on them. Mousing over the button causes the happenings to scroll up or down at a constant rate.

Though this is OK, it takes control away from me the user. I'm impatient. I don't want to sit there and watch the thing scroll at it's snail's pace. I want to control the speed. How about making it so mousing over the arrows causes it to scroll, but clicking on the arrows causes it to skip ahead to the next screen of happenings? That gives control back to me. I control my experience, not the Flash developer.

Flash on Your Home Page - FSU Does it Right

2006-12-11T16:20:00.000-08:00

Incoherent babblings about using Flash on your home page, including one good example.

Everybody loves Flash animations. Everybody except usability designers, that is. Usability designers are into functionality, simplicity, accessibility - all things that Flash excels at doing poorly. Well, to be fair, it isn't just that Flash does these things poorly; it's more that it encourages Flash designers to do these things poorly.

Ah, but things have changed, you say. Flash is being used more appropriately and provides real functionality. In some cases, there is actually a tiny grain of truth to this. Let's go so far as to say that flash isn't being used quite so gratuitously these days.

It's not that I hate Flash - I used to be a Flash developer. But no matter the thousands of considerations you have as you build your university's Web site, remember that content is king. Forever and always. People go to any Web site for one of three reasons (sometimes all): to find some information, to conduct some business, or to have some social interaction. That's all about content. Sure, maybe that information is porn, maybe that business is online gambling, and maybe that social interaction is a singles chat room. But finding information, doing business and interacting socially are the three main classes of Internet activities. And they are all ruled by content.

What does Flash contribute to these activities? Not much usually. Sure, there's Flash video, but it ain't the only game in town for video. Yeah, there are Flash-based shopping sites, but how common are they?

Nope, Flash doesn't really contribute much to the content of a Web site. And whatever content your Flash doodad might have is inaccessible. Ditto for kewl animated Flash navigation. Oops! That's a no-no in the CSU.

So, death to Flash, right? Well, not so fast. Flash can have a role to play, and some schools and businesses are using it reasonably well in that role. Flash's strengths are in visual presentation, animation and interaction. Obviously, all of those can be good things on your home page if not over done.

From my perspective, Flash can be used well as a marketing tool on the home page, as an attention-getter - providing visually interesting views of the campus and campus life, teasers for spotlight stories, or other visually heavy but content light material. Certainly, it should not be used for core home page content or navigation (because of accessibility issues).

Take a look at Florida State's home page. They have a Flash-based rotating spotlight teaser, mostly about faculty research and achievements. What's nice about this?

It's visual. Each piece has a photo related to the teaser.
It's personal. Most of the pieces have a photo of the faculty member looking at (visually engaging) the viewer.
It's prominent. It takes up the prime real estate on the page and the text is large enough to read easily.
It's short. Though I think the text could be a bit punchier, the headline and teaser are short and to the point. A "More" button lets users see the rest of the story.
It gives the user control. With built-in "previous", "next" and "pause" buttons, the user can skip to the next story, go back to the previous story or stop the animation altogether.
It isn't annoying. The animations are simple and relatively unobtrusive. And there is no audio.

If you're going to do Flash on your home page, this is a great way to do it.

Personally, I would mix it up more. Fewer faculty and more students. I get the impression that FSU is trying to appeal to potential doctoral and post-doc students, and maybe potential research faculty. Maybe that's the kind of institution it is. I don't actually know.

But for Chico State...well, need I really say more? We're obviously going to be appealing mostly to potential undergraduate students, so highlighting student life (the beauty of the campus, local activities, etc.) and student achievements might be a better focus. A lot of it depends upon who the primary audience for our home page is.

Analysis of Navigational Links on Top 20 Home Pages - Part 2

2006-12-06T10:42:00.000-08:00

An analysis of the labeling and terminology used in links on the top 20 home pages.

This Analysis is based partly on this post.

In Part 1, I looked at the most common navigational links on university home pages. In this post, I'll be taking a look at labeling and terminology.

Labeling is vital because the words and phrases that we use can have very different meanings to different people and audience groups. Ambiguous labels can confuse and frustrate users. And the use of non-standard labels can leave users lost at sea.

The value of understanding labeling is in being able to use terms and labels that your users both understand and expect. Some labels become so common as to be de facto standards; witness the "home page" and the "shopping cart". Everyone knows what these are, but there is no defined standard requiring that people call them that. Those standards arose solely through common usage.

In the same way that "home page" has become an ubiquitous label, other terms have risen to the point of de facto standards on university Web sites.

Academics and Research
"Academics" and "Research" are the two most common home page link concepts. As such, they need to communicate clearly, and you would expect - or at least hope for - some uniformity in terminology and labeling.

Term	Number
Academics	15
Academics & Research	2
Academic Programs	2
Research & Innovation	1

Term	Number
Research	15
Academics & Research	2
Research & Libraries	1
Research & Innovation	1

Both "Academics" and "Research" are overwhelmingly used in one permutation or another on virtually every site. Personally, I think that "Academics" seems potentially vague and ambiguous to me, but it is clear when you follow the link that "Academics" has a well-defined and accepted meaning. What do you find when you click on "Academics"? The following are the most common links:

Schools/Colleges
Departments/Academic Units
Undergraduate Education
Graduate Education
Advising
Centers & Institutes
Catalogs
Academic Support Services

It seems obvious that - unless we intend the term to mean something very different - we should follow the de facto standard that has clearly been created in labeling links to "academics".

“By creating a label we are building the site's information architecture. The labels define the categories of information, and the categories define the site's structure.”

Looking further into this you begin to realize that it isn't really just about labels and terminology; it's really about the structure of the site itself. By creating a label called "Academics" and placing the items in the above list there, we are building the site's structure. The labels define the categories of information, and the categories define the site's structure.

Audience Groups

Some audience group names can only be expressed in certain ways. "Alumni" are always referred to as alumni; "faculty" always as faculty. But other groups are a bit more open to interpretation. For example, there used to be some consensus that prospective students would be referred using that label, but more and more sites are now using "Future Students" to describe that audience group, though "Prospective Students" is still more common. This change may be occurring for several reasons. Universities may see "future students" as more hopeful, encouraging, and welcoming than "prospective students", or it may simply be a matter of trying to squeeze the phrase into a limited space.

Term	Number
Prospective Students	9
Future Students	3

Once you get past "prospective students" to parents, friends, visitors, etc., it becomes something of a free for all.

Term	Number
Visitors	7
Friends	5
Parents	3
Community	3

Other Terms

Athletics/Sports

To me, "Athletics" and "Sports" carry two slightly different meanings, where "athletics" are the official university extramural sports and "sports" is that plus the recreational and intramural campus sports. But that's just my personal take.

Term	Number
Athletics	10
Athletics & Recreation	2
Sports	2
Sports & Recreation	1

Jobs/Employment
No real consensus here, though the word "employment" appears in eight of the labels.

Term	Number
Employment	5
Jobs	3
Staff & Employment	2
Working at…	2
Job Opportunities	2
Employment Opportunities	1

Analysis of Navigational Links on Top 20 Home Pages - Part 1

2006-12-04T14:28:00.000-08:00

An analysis of the most common links found on the top 20 university home pages.

Purpose
The purpose of this analysis is to examine the navigational systems used on university home pages, in order to shed light on:

Which links and types of links are most common
Which types of organizational schemes are most common
Which types of labeling and terminology are the most common

This analysis focuses only on navigational systems (e.g, "menus") and not on all of the links on each page. Links to specific news or feature stories, events, specific schools or colleges, video clips, etc. were not included in this analysis.

Methods

For this analysis I counted the number of times a particular link appeared on the 20 home pages. In some cases different terms were used to describe functionally equivalent things (e.g., "Athletics" and "Sports"). In those cases I group the items under the same heading. In addition, I only counted those items plainly visible on the home page; items occurring in pop-up menus were not included in the count (45% of sites used pop-up menus to one degree or another).

I did not always count every single link on each page. There were some links - that I either felt weren't relevant to my goals (e.g., links to specific news and feature stories, privacy policies, "About this Site" links) or that were unique to the specific site - that I did not count. In total I counted 78 different links, and a total of 493 links on the 20 home pages (an average of 25 links per page).

Loosely following Rosenfeld and Moreville's (2002) list of organizational systems, I divided links into one of four types:

Topical/informational - pertaining to specific topics
Organizational - pertaining to the organization of the university
Audience - addressed toward specific audience groups
Task - pertaining to actions and things that can be done

I chose these four types as opposed to Rosenfeld and Moreville's "topic", "task", "audience" and "metaphor" both because I felt that they ignored the fact that many Web sites organize their sites to reflect their internal organization, and because metaphoric organizational systems are pretty much a thing of the past (for good reason). These four types follow those used in my post on the Navigational Structure of the CSU, Chico Home Page.

Defining the types of some links was difficult. Is "Libraries" and organizational link or a topical link? How about "Directory"? I made my best guess and you may not agree

Results

The links that I counted and their relative frequency appear in the table below.

Link	Percent of Sites	Type
Academics	100%	Topical/Informational
Research	95%	Topical/Informational
Alumni	90%	Audience
Faculty	80%	Audience
Athletics/Sports	75%	Topical/Informational
Libraries	75%	Organizational
Contact Us	75%	Task
Jobs/Employment	75%	Topical/Informational
Students	75%	Audience
Staff	75%	Audience
About	70%	Topical/Informational
Giving	65%	Task
Admissions	60%	Topical/Informational
Parents	60%	Audience
Administration	55%	Organizational
Arts/Museums/Culture	55%	Topical/Informational
Calendar	55%	Topical/Informational
Campus Map	55%	Topical/Informational
Directory/Index	55%	Topical/Informational
Prospective Students	55%	Audience
Colleges & Schools	50%	Organizational
Visiting	45%	Topical/Informational
Medical Center	40%	Topical/Informational
Continuing/Distance Ed	35%	Topical/Informational
Email	35%	Task
International	35%	Topical/Informational
News	35%	Topical/Informational
Visitors	35%	Audience
Financial Aid	30%	Topical/Informational
Friends	30%	Audience
Departments	25%	Organizational
Diversity	25%	Topical/Informational
Facts	25%	Topical/Informational
Photos/Video	25%	Topical/Informational
Portal	25%	Topical/Informational
Recreation	25%	Topical/Informational
Student Life	25%	Topical/Informational
Tours	25%	Topical/Informational
Academic Calendar	20%	Topical/Informational
Application	20%	Topical/Informational
Campus Life	20%	Topical/Informational
Centers & Institutes	20%	Topical/Informational
Community	20%	Topical/Informational
Graduate Studies	20%	Topical/Informational
Health & Safety	20%	Topical/Informational
Offices	20%	Organizational
Outreach	20%	Topical/Informational
Services	20%	Topical/Informational
U & Town	20%	Topical/Informational
Business & Industry	15%	Topical/Informational
Computing	15%	Topical/Informational
Disability/Accessibility	15%	Topical/Informational
Events	15%	Topical/Informational
Find People	15%	Task
Housing	15%	Topical/Informational
Site map	15%	Topical/Informational
Technology	15%	Topical/Informational
Patients	15%	Audience
Community	15%	Audience
Advising	10%	Topical/Informational
Catalog	10%	Topical/Informational
Courses	10%	Topical/Informational
Help	10%	Topical/Informational
Majors	10%	Topical/Informational
Transfer	10%	Topical/Informational
Donors	10%	Audience
Bookstore	5%	Topical/Informational
Class Schedule	5%	Topical/Informational
Collections	5%	Organizational
Fellowships	5%	Topical/Informational
Human Resources	5%	Organizational
Orientation	5%	Topical/Informational
President/Chancellor	5%	Organizational
Spotlights	5%	Topical/Informational
Tranportation	5%	Topical/Informational
Tuition/Fees	5%	Topical/Informational
Undergrad Research	5%	Topical/Informational
Foundations & Corps	5%	Audience

Analysis

Far and away the most common type of link on university home pages are topical/informational in nature.

Type	Total	Percent
Topical/Informational	54	69%
Audience	12	15%
Organizational	8	10%
Task	4	5%

However, when you look at only the most popular links (occurring on 50% or more of home pages), a somewhat different picture emerges. Audience links double in frequency, accounting for 30% of the most popular links, and indicating that audience-oriented links are among the most popular. In fact, 18 of the 20 sites had a specific navigational structures for audience groups.

Type	Total	Percent
Topical/Informational	10	48%
Audience	6	29%
Organizational	3	14%
Task	2	9%

Other than that, there's no discernable pattern as to the nature of the most common links. Of course Academics and Research get a lot of play, but so do Jobs/Employment which is on a clearly different hierarchical level than the first two.

On the other hand, there is a long tail of links that occur on three or fewer sites, suggesting that there are many different potential approaches in building home page navigation and that different universities have different needs and priorities for their home page navigation.

Discovering and addressing those needs is perhaps the biggest challenge in redesign the CSU, Chico home page.

References
Rosenfeld, L. & Morville, P. 2002. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. O'Reilly. 2nd Edition.

So What's It All Mean? Part 2 - Most Viewed Pages

2006-11-30T17:19:00.000-08:00

A discussion of the most commonly viewed pages on the CSU, Chico Web site.

This post is based on this analysis.

In some ways there is less to learn from the list of most viewed pages than there is from the most popular searches.

For one thing, many of these pages are buried deep within the hierarchy and are part of specific courses. Certainly, "Skull Model" (#14) and "Indian Caste System" (#17) are parts of very popular courses. The Skull Model has been around for years and has always been a highly viewed page.

One thing that is new is the rise of social networking pages, like "Progressive Students Union WIKI" (#2) and "Taiwanese Students Association" (#8, #19). Pages like these aren't part of the "official campus web presence" that is somewhat centrally maintained. So, though they are an important part of what is going on on campus, they aren't about to appear on the home page any time soon.

What's left is pretty much the usual suspects; library, class schedule, campus directory, catalog, etc. Student Computing is prominent, but that's because all of their labs computers use that as a home page.

There are a number of "deep link" pages in the top 30 most viewed pages. Some of these, like "Job Opportunities" (#21) are important enough to consider placing on the home page. However, most of the deep links can be reached via from the home page via a main page link (e.g., "Athletics - Baseball" can be reached from the "Athletics" link on the home page). The only real anomoly is the "Career Planning - Cover Letter Examples" page (#6). This page might have been used in a course or other activity, so without hard evidence I'd hesitate to consider placing a link to this on the home page.

Overall, based on the analysis, most of the bases are covered with respect to having the most viewed pages linked from the home page.

So What's It All Mean? Part 1 - Search Terms

2006-11-30T13:35:00.000-08:00

A discussion of what to do about the most commonly searched for terms on the CSU, Chico Web site.

I'm a big advocate of the school of thought that says that your most popular search term is your hardest to find page. In other words, if people prefer to browse first and search after a browse fails (see this post), then a large portion of searches are for things that they couldn't find via browsing.

So, what does that mean? Should we put big flashing links for campus map, transcripts, and financial aid on the home page?

Maybe it does.

These are obviously high demand pages and should have high visibility. Of the top 30 search terms, only eight had visible links on the home page (campus map, class schedule, athletics, bookstore, portal, Orion, library, and catalog).

When you look at the placement of these eight links, you can see that all of them are either in the lower part of the page, or use very small text (or both in the case of "campus map").

Five of the links occur in the "photo/link" strip toward the bottom of the page, suggesting that perhaps this bar either is not highly visible or does not communicate effectively the fact that there are links there.

In any case, none of these links are prominently placed on the page, and this probably contributes to their popularity as search terms.

Another seven popular search terms appeared in the blue pop-up menus on the home page (financial aid, housing, jobs, academic calendar, records and registration, human resources, and associated students), indicating that the pop-up menus perhaps don't get as much use as we would like.

So overall 15 of the top 30 searches appear some place on the home page, but none of them have a high visibility.

Recommendations
I don't actually recommend big flashing links on the home page, but I do recommend that we take a closer look at who is doing the searching and whom the home page is serving.

A close look at who is likely doing the searching reveals the following about the top 57 search terms (based on this post):

Likely Searchers	Terms	Percent
Current Student	54	95%
Prospective Student	20	35%
Community	6	11%
Staff	5	9%
Alumni	3	5%
Faculty	3	5%

If, in fact, current students are likely to be searching for 54 of the top 57 terms, then I think it becomes clear that they are the major audience for our home page as it exists. It doesn't have to stay that way, of course. Humboldt State redesigned their home page to be a marketing tool for recruiting new students. That's great, but right now I think it's clear that current students are doing searches more than all other groups combined and would most benefit from a redeveloped home page.

IF the goal of the home page remains to serve current students, then a reorganization of the link structure to increase the visibility of the most popular search terms is an obvious idea.

How to do it?
Some campuses put a list of "Quick Links" on their home pages (University of Michigan, Princeton, for example); a list of supposedly popular links. But I'm not a fan of these for the same reason I'm not a fan of FAQ pages: it's an unorganized grab bag of stuff and there is no apparent reason for me to expect that what I'm looking for will be there. The "information scent" is too faint for me to want to go down that trail. In the case of the U Mich site, they at make them all visible (though they're in no discernible order).

Personally, I'm more of a fan of the approach that the University of Florida takes, which is to have main headings with a list of popular links below it, reminiscent of the old Yahoo! home page. Western Washington University does something similar. In fact, I suggested something similar during the last redesign in 2003:

What's the advantage?
The advantages of this approach IMO are:

Links are part of a clear organizational structure (e.g., "campus map" could go under "About Chico State") instead of a haphazard list-o'-links.
Links are plainly visible on the page without having to click on a "Quick Links" list or a pop-up menu.

The challenge is coming up with an organizational structure that includes as many of the high profile search terms as possible.

However, page structures like this have fallen out of favor in recent years, probably because people think that pop-up menus are more effective. This is certainly true from a space usage perspective, but I'm not actually convinced that this is the case from a findability perspective. My feeling is that pop-up menus are OK if the user knows they are there and if the menus are short and clear enough to be quickly scannable, but otherwise may actually reduce findability by making links on the home page less visible.

This is just one idea, and I'm sure that there are other ways to do this that present the links as part of an organized scheme and doesn't hide them in a drop-down list or pop-up menu somewhere.

Another Approach for Campus Map
The University of Wisconsin has put a link to their interactive campus map in a very prominent place on the home page, using an icon to draw attention. For something is as high demand as the campus map (and something that lends itself to a visual representation), this is not a bad approach. This wouldn't work for everything, of course, because the page would be littered with icons, but for the campus map (which is a perennial favorite), the idea has some merit and would make it clearly stand out.

Search vs. Browse

2006-11-30T11:03:00.000-08:00

Insane babblings about why people use search instead of browsing, and visa versa.

Why do people use search instead of browsing or visa versa? We'll I'm sure that there are studies out detailing why, but I prefer to wing it based solely on opinion with no facts to support me. So here are my reasons why people prefer searching:

They think it's quicker (but will try browsing if searching fails)
They know exactly what they're looking for
They don't trust (or have had a bad experience with) the site's browsing architecture
They want to get instant results without a lot of steps (this is a combination of 1, 2, and 3)

Ultimately (particularly for a younger audience who are a) more web savvy, and b) want instant results without intermediary steps) searching is about getting to the desired information as quickly as possible without having to make decisions and without thinking about choices. This approach is referred as teleporting. Whether or not this is a good thing I'll leave to others to debate.

However, "The Perfect Search Engine Is Not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search" (now I'm starting to do my research) suggests just the opposite, that people tend to browse first and search only when that fails, and that people tend to return to browsing (or "orienteering") even after a successful search.

One interesting paper (Effects of Scent and Breadth on Use of Site-Specific Search on E-Commerce Web Sites) found that the decision of a user to use search or browse approaches to finding information depended on several things, including:

How clearly organized and labeled a site's menu system was ("information scent")
How prominent search and browse areas were
The user's inclination to search or browse

Here's an article that summarizes the two papers mentioned above - that I found only after I found the other two.

The Upshot
What's the upshot of all this for administrators and others trying to plan a new website?

My take on it is this: If it's true that people prefer to browse (I plan to test this hypothesis), then we need to make absolutely certain that our site structure is extremely clear, well-designed, intuitive and easy to use. As Katz and Byrne say, "providing site search should not be used to compensate for poor menu design, and provide[s] further evidence regarding the design of effective menu structures."

Let's face it, a perfect search engine would always give you exactly what you wanted the first time every time. If that happened, no site would even have a menu; they'd all look like the Google home page.

But search engines aren't perfect for several reasons (ambiguity of terms, lack of context, limited algorithms, and poor labeling being just a few). And if people prefer to use menu systems over search, it is a condemnation of the ability search engines to return desired results, because we all know how poorly organized most menu systems are.

People are choosing the lesser of two evils in this case. And though there are a few things we can do to improve search results, we have much less control over that than we do over the information architecture and menu systems of our sites.

References
Katz, M. A. and Byrne, M. D. (2003). Effects of Scent and Breadth on Use of Site-specific Search on E-Commerce Web Sites. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 10(3) pp 198-220. (Link)

Teevan, J., Alvarado, C., Ackerman, M. and Karger, D. (2004). The perfect Search Engine is not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004, pp. 415-4422. (Link)

Home Page Structure of the Top 20 Sites

2006-11-29T14:44:00.000-08:00

Analysis of the layout, structure and space usage on the top 20 university home pages.

I was curious as to what were the most common page elements on the top 20 sites. How many sites included news or events or welcome messages, as well as how many used left hand navigation vs. top navigation, etc. The following analysis breaks down my findings.

Most Common Page Elements

Element	Percent of Sites
Search Box	100%
Photos	100%
Top Banner	90%
News	85%
Copyright Notice	75%
Left Navigation	70%
Feature/Spotlight	55%
Quick Links	45%
Top Navigation	35%
Contact Info	30%
Events	30%
Right Navigation	15%
Inside "University"	15%
Directory	10%
Announcements	10%
Calendar	5%
Visit	5%
Recruitment	5%

Surprisingly, a search box and photos were the only things that all 20 sites had on their home page. But maybe that's not so surprising given the difficulty in organizing something as complex as a university website.

Of course, all sites also had identity/branding that identified the university on the home page.

Content Analysis

In terms of actual content (as opposed to structural or navigational elements), there was less agreement among the 20 sites. Only two items - News and Feature/Spotlight occurred on more that 50% of the 20 home pages, and the majority of content types occurred on 10% or less of the sites.

Element	Percent of Sites
News	85%
Feature/Spotlight	55%
Events	30%
Inside "University"	15%
Directory	10%
Announcements	10%
Calendar	5%
Visit	5%
Recruitment	5%

Page Element Placement

Another thing I was curious about was the placement of page elements on the page. I know that the issue of where to put the search box will inevitable arise, and I wanted to have hard data on what the "big boys" are doing.

Surprisingly, there were no real surprises. If you've read Neilsen, you realize that everybody is pretty much following the banner-on-the-top/navigation-on-the-left standard.

The following "heat maps" (OK, they're not heat maps in the traditional meaning) show where each of the most common page elements were placed on the page. To make these maps, I took a screen shot of each home page and then drew transparent rectangles over each page element. When I was done I removed the screenshots, leaving a stack of rectangles behind. Note that not every page was the same width, and I made the screenshots the size of the biggest page.

Top Banner
As expected, most sites use a top banner of varying heights, and most of them are placed - unbelievably enough - at the top of the page.

Identity/Branding
Here I'm only referring to the campus name and a logo or seal, if any. Some campuses put their logo in various places on the page, but almost all campuses put their name in the upper left part of the banner.

Search Box
Search boxes tend to be scattered around a bit more than the identity due to page layout considerations, but it's still clear that the most popular location is in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

Navigation
Instead of trying to break down the navigation into different types, I just highlighted any area that was clearly navigational in nature. Many home pages had multiple navigation areas. Again, no surprise as the left side of pages and the area directly below the banner were the most popular locations for navigation.

Photos
Photos are used to create interest and connection on a home page, humanizing the content by bringing people/and or the environment onto the page. Photos also add visual richness, whatever their content. Many sites use photos as part of features or spotlights on the home page, so there is considerable overlap in the placement of photos and the placement of features.

Again, not surprising, photos - with their attention-grabbing abilities - are most commonly prominently placed in the upper center of home pages. Many sites had photos in multiple areas of the home page, serving a variety of purposes.

News/Announcements
News and announcements (mostly labeled "News") were the most common content element on home pages. Though there was no overwhelming consensus on the placement of News, the most common location was near the center of the page, or on the center left, just to the right of the navigation.

Feature/Spotlight
Features or spotlights are either short articles or article teasers placed on the home page, mostly highlighting some interesting or newsworthy aspect of the campus. For example, Cornell spotlighted a talk given by Shimon Peres; UW spotlighted sports stories and student research in ANWR.

Placement of Features varied widely, but was most concentrated in the center of the page, and closely follows the placement of photos, since virtually all Features were accompanied by photos.

Events/Calendars
Events and/or calendars only appeared on about a third of home pages, but tended to all be placed lower center or lower right portion of the page.

Quick Links

Less than half of sites contained "Quick Links", typically as a drop-down list of links, but in a couple of cases as an actual list of links. The placement of Quick Links on the home page shows no discernible pattern.

The "Average" Home Page

On the "average" home page, 21% of the page area is taken up by photos, and 13% is taken up by navigation. Over a quarter of the page is taken up with white space or other content.

The following graphic shows the relative average size of each content area, in proportion to each other and the page.

The "Perfect" Home Page

Assuming that you wanted to build your home page based on the most common practices (which might or might not be a good idea), you would probably lay it out something like this:

Of course, this doesn't take into account the purpose of your home page, the primary intended audience(s) for your home page, your campus's particular branding, etc., etc.