You’ve seen the optical illusion before. It’s interesting how, even though you’ve seen it so many times, you still feel that mental shift almost like shutters in a window when you adjust your mind to look at it from both perspectives.

There’s a great article on A List Apart from a couple days ago that is highly applicable to what we’re going through with the redesign. Titled “Look at it Another Way”, the article explains how critical it is to really put yourself in the place of the folks using your system in order to truly deliver something to them that is useful and effective.

This goes back to the discussion I brought up a while back on whether or not we call the housing here on campus “Dorms” or “Residence Halls” (out of curiosity, did anyone see all the back to school ads in the paper over the last month or two? how many of them referenced residence halls?). It’s easy for us to always come from the perspective of “us telling them” — as the “creator of the system.” It isn’t so easy to come from the opposite perspective of “us asking them.”

Fortunately for us, all of the research we did at the outset of this process has given us much insight into the needs of the people who will be using our site the most. Now we’re at a point where we’ll actually see if the ideas we’ve come up with to accommodate their needs actually work in practice. I’ll be going into a few high schools next week sitting down one on one with high school students to walk them through some user stories using the functional wireframes we’ve created. (NOTE: We’ve only created them to function correctly in Firefox 2 and 3 — they’ll work okay in IE and other browsers, I just can’t make any promises).

During the test, I’ll ask them to perform some very basic actions using the site’s navigation structure. Examples would be:

• How much does it cost to attend EWU?
• What’s the housing like at EWU?
• How do you apply to attend EWU?
• How do you find financial aid info?
• What are the available majors and minors at EWU?

If they get hung up along the way or if they somehow get confused or lost, I’ll probe with other questions to find out where their difficulty is coming from — what the root of their confusion is. The feedback I get will be posted here for everyone to see.

If you have time, I’d suggest poking around in the wireframes yourself. Only some of the links are functional since we’re not spending the time here to create a completely functional site. We’re really interested in finding out if people are able to perform critical functions on the site easily. Feel free to test them out on friends and family too! I’d love to hear what others have to say about these new navigation paradigms.