New design sneak peek!

We’re continuing the site’s new design based on wireframe D now and it’s looking good!

I thought I’d link to the designs here so you get a sneak peek of the direction we’re heading. This is still quite early and we plan to do formal reviews of the design here on the blog to get feedback/suggestions/comments, but I know everyone is curious about the new direction, so why wait?

Here are a few samples of the homepage template (NOTE: the homepage content is yet to be discussed in great detail — we’ve been focusing on the “shell” of the new site’s design which includes the top navigation, surrounding background elements, footer, and initial typography and color ideas):

• Homepage: This is what the user will see when they first get to ewu.edu
• Main navigation mouseover state: When the user mouses over a main navigation button, they’ll see a slightly lighter gray background (see the Admissions button in the upper left)
• Audience navigation mouseover state: When a user mouses over one of the audience links in the upper right, this menu will slide down (only after a slight delay though lest we annoy users with random popping up of unrequested menus) NOTE: Which links we use in these menus are still being worked out.
• Quicklinks mouseover state: This is what the user will see when they mouse over the QuickLinks tab. Note the “Customize…” link at the bottom. This link will take users to a page where they can decide what QuickLinks they’d like to have in that menu. The list will be computer-specific so will be handy for faculty/staff here on campus who use the same computer to frequently access certain areas of the EWU site.
• Auxiliary message layer: This area will only appear if users click the overhead screen handle present directly below the main navigation. We haven’t decided how this will look yet, but this is an initial idea. It is just another way for us to present as complete of a picture as we can about EWU and its surroundings through current regional data, photos, videos and potentially other social networking widgets.

There you have it! An initial look at the new design. Depending on the feedback we get with it, the design will evolve and probably change over the coming weeks but this should get you thinking about it (and hopefully a little excited too!). We’re working on internal page look & feel now (left navigation, content headers, etc.) so we’ll post those when the dust clears a little bit on the design.

Please feel free to leave comments!

social networking

Just a little mini-plug here for some of our social networking efforts that will begin to tie in more directly to our University website. For those of you who haven’t seen them, I invite you to check out the following links to see other areas that EWU is beginning to maintain a presence.

• Facebook
• Flickr (check out the EWU Flickr group to join and contribute EWU photos to the pool!)
• YouTube
• MySpace
• Start Something Big (of course!)

Thanks to John Demke, Kit Frantzich and Sam Buzby for the hard work on getting these up and running and maintaining them. We’ve already had great successes with them and we’re still at the tip of the iceberg!

With the redesign, we’re planning on tying directly into these services to enhance the experience and increase effectiveness of the University website. The goal is to give external audiences (be they future/current students, potential faculty or staff, community members, alumni, etc.) a more holistic picture of the University and the people who make the EWU world go ’round. Look for some of the ideas on how we’ll accomplish this in upcoming posts….

Also, some of you who might be EWU Alumni should check out their new site. The social networking aspect of it is very strong and they have some great functionality around event registration/notification.

We’re also planning on infiltrating the worlds of Wikipedia and Zinch more effectively. We’re considering Twitter as a possibility but we’re not yet sure how effective that will be in this market. If you have any other ideas or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments!

user testing feedback!

EDIT: It came to my attention that nowhere in here did I reference what was Wireframe C and what was Wireframe D. Just to be totally clear –

• This is wireframe C
• This is wireframe D

Maybe I should do some user testing for this blog?

Today was our first day of user testing with the functional wireframes we created for the website redesign. I went up to Ferris High School this morning and sat down with a handful of students to go through the wireframes with some basic user tasks to see how the site organization and navigation worked for them.

Boy, was it awesome.

There’s a lot riding on these user tests. I’ve referenced on more than one occasion in my presentations that if these user tests don’t go well, we’ll go back to the drawing board and rethink our approach.

I’m pleased to announce that it looks like we can safely put the drawing board away! The functional wireframes were received very well. Here’s my bullet-pointed summary:

• Users preferred the functionality of wireframe D over wireframe C
• They hardly noticed (i.e., they effortlessly used them) the left nav, top nav and dropdowns — a sign of a strong user interface
• For tasks like finding tuition/fees, program information, majors/minors, financial aid, directions, etc. users looked in their logical buckets without using the dropdown audience-based navigation. This is a big point! If something didn’t fit as nicely into those categories (things like housing/dining info, clubs & activities, etc.) they went for the audience dropdowns. Otherwise, they used the main navigation bar — Academics, Admissions, Resources, etc. — or the footer for their primary information needs.
• Having the “Apply Now” link prominent in the masthead made it extremely easy for them to point to where they would go to Apply. A couple of students felt that the Future Students dropdown and then the Apply Now link was more comfortable for them but that it was just a matter of preference
• Users clicked on the logo in the upper left when told to go “Home.”
• When showed the initial two design concepts, users preferred the look of C over D, stating consistently that they felt there was too much “white” in design D. They liked the functionality of content and navigation in D better than C, but they felt that the lack of color was a drawback to D and still reminiscent of the current EWU site.
• When users did get lost (which happened rarely) it had to do with how content was laid out on what we call the “splash” pages — pages without the left navigation. This is good because those problems are easily remedied by improved design and/or seasonal updates.
• I heard at least 5 or 6 times, “Wow, that was easy!” with an almost surprised tone to it. I think these students have either A) tried to navigate our current site or B) had bad luck navigating other university sites!

There’s the synopsis! All in all, I’m very pleased with what we’ve put together and I think the fruits of the research and work we’ve all done up until this point is beginning to pay off! I’m planning to do another group of students this week or very early next week, but things are looking promising for a modified version of wireframe D! We’re now working on aesthetic design options of the D functionality.

Thanks to everyone who has been involved in this process so far! You are all fantastic to work with and I applaud you for your dedication and commitment to doing what is most right for EWU. In particular, I’d like to thank the following folks who have spent a great number of hours so far to get us to the point we’re currently at:

• The MarCom Web Team (Sam Buzby, Kit Frantzich, Sheila Wollweber)
• The IT Web Team (Alex Chernikov, Betsy Knox, Colin Turnbull)
• The EWU Web Community Leaders (Paul Merchant, Dana Simmelink, Scott Zinn)
• The rest of the MarCom team for their valued input and ideas (Dave Sonntag, Teresa Conway, Kandi Carper, John Demke, Dave Meany, Ryan Gaard, Matt Hepworth, Steve Bateman)
• Desautel Hege Communications (Michelle Hege, Kristen Paul, Lisa Cargill)
• Klundt-Hosmer Design (thanks Rick and Mastery!)

…forgive me if I’ve forgotten anyone!

So, onward and upward! We will continue to test and post more of our findings. Once we have the initial design concepts ready as well, those will go up for all to comment on.

a change in perspective

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.

today’s QSI presentation at eastern washington university

Today I gave a little diddy on the Eastern Washington University website overhaul at the 7th Annual QSI Conference. For those of you who don’t know, the QSI Conference at EWU is basically a two-day period where there are multiple sessions folks can attend that are lead by EWU faculty and staff on topics ranging from how to open jobs with the marketing department to assistive technology to maintaining a positive attitude.

For my presentation, I basically gave a quick update on how the website redesign project is going. The presentation is available here in PDF form (careful! it’s about a 9.5MB file) if you’d like to download a copy for yourself. It may seem a little odd without me talking about it, but I think you’ll get the idea. You’ll find links to our semi-functional wireframes within with which we’ll be conducting user testing as well as an initial look at some early look and feel concepts for the new website design.

Thanks to those of you who attended! I know we’ll be seeing more of each other sooner than later.

On the topic of Ingeniux CMS’ text (wysiwyg) editor

One of the many complaints/concerns/worries about CMS we’ve heard from folks who use CMS on a daily basis is the wonky editor for your content. I believe I’ve explained to a few folks who have asked that the current editor in CMS version 5.2 (what we’re using now) is going to be replaced in the upgraded CMS version 6. Hooraayyy!!

Ingeniux recently wrote a blog post about the editor and some of the theory behind WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editing on their site. In it, Nathan references the new editor version 6 of CMS will use, TinyMCE. Make sure you check out the demo of the application. Across the top of that page you’ll see other links to what it looks like with all the features enabled and also what it looks like with some skinning work done on it.

Anyway, here’s to the new content editor! We’re extremely excited about this upgrade in the new version of CMS. We foresee it making life much easier on all of us!

Left navigation, aka “whack-a-mole”

One of the things that makes ewu.edu so difficult to navigate is the fact that left navigation constantly changes. It can make for an interesting game of hunt-and-peck when you’re trying to find content on our site.

In some cases this style of navigation is okay — but on a site like ours where a sense of place/destination is critical for usability, it can create problems. I applaud Ingeniux for the clever way of auto-generating navigation in this manner. However, with the redesign we’ll be striving to adjust how our left navigation works.

As an example, here are a couple screen shots from our current site:

1.) Main academics page

2.) Undergraduate academics page

Notice how the left nav totally changes? If anyone wanted to look at the Programs A to Z Index from the Undergraduate page, they’d have a tough time doing so! In fact, they’d most likely have to leave the page and go back to the original academics landing page in order to get there.

Now check out a different left nav approach:
1.) Gap Women’s homepage

2.) Gap Women’s jeans page

Notice how the other left nav items are maintained even though the user has drilled down into Jeans? This allows the user to continue to freely navigate throughout the site without having to think hard about how to trace their steps back out of the path they chose.

In the redesign, one of the challenges we’re facing is to create a left nav much like what you see immediately above. Once you’ve navigated to a main topic on the site, that left nav should essentially remain the same. Organizing our site’s content into logical sections that the user can identify with rather than by the structure of the University is critical to the success of this tactic. This is a big challenge for a site like EWU’s (indeed, it’s one of the reasons this project is more than just a redesign and more like a reorganization) just because we have sooooo much content out there. But the fact that we have so much content should only reinforce the need for reliable navigation.

This strategy may require each unit in the university to think a little harder about the navigation on their site. But thinking a little harder about it so our website users are happier will make things easier on us all in the long run.

Questions from this week’s meeting

There were a few good questions a few people asked at the web publishers meeting on Wednesday. I thought others who weren’t able to attend might have the same questions so I’ll answer them here for reference.

In fact, if people start asking enough questions, I may just start posting regularly at the end of the week with a summary of questions I received about the redesign and my answer to them. Hopefully you’ll be more in the know that way!

You’ll have to forgive me if there’s a question you know was asked but I haven’t addressed below. This list is from memory, so please tell me if I missed questions that you think should be added.

How were you able to split the audiences out for page hit count stats?
How this was done is not 100% scientific, because as you know there is no way of knowing with absolute certainty who is whom on the web. We essentially looked at the landing pages of the audiences presented under the “Just For You” section of the homepage and worked with those numbers. So if someone clicked through “Current Students” to the current students landing page, we’d look and see what pages they clicked on from there. This is really the only simple way we can divide traffic on our site by audiences.

Who is deciding what links go on the homepage?
While we in marketing & communications are collaborating with IT to determine how best to implement what links are present on the homepage and available globally throughout the site, our main goal is to let our target audience research, statistics and best practice research dictate what is made available on the homepage and globally.

Will the new site layout be fluid/wider than it is now?
Yes, it will be wider. When the current site was done, it was created to be as wide as reasonably possible given the screen resolution stats at the time. Though a completely fluid layout that stretches to the width of your entire screen regardless of size probably won’t be done in the near future, we are definitely planning on widening the site design to approximately 900 pixels (give or take 20 most likely).

What are you doing about slower computers/internet connections?
Usability and accessibility are of utmost importance during this redesign process. Part of making a site usable involves making sure the performance of said site is swift and efficient for the majority of users out there. While I don’t have direct statistics available to me right now on what types of connections people are using to browse our site (e.g., DSL vs. Cable vs. Dial-up percentages) I do have plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting we ought to keep things simple for the computers out there that aren’t using the latest and greatest technology and speeds. While we will still have multimedia content available on the site to appear current, the plan is to not force users to have to get their information via these methods. Alternatives that are simpler must be present to ensure ease of access to information regardless of what connection type you are using.

As a public institution, accessibility will also be of paramount importance. Already we’re looking into ways of providing text only versions of our site.

Will you have a policy regarding use of multimedia on sites and how much of it is acceptable?
Most likely, yes. A whole new set of standards and content policies will be published and maintained throughout this process.

Are you increasing the power of the site’s search engine?
That is being looked into right now. We understand the need for robust search capability on the site and will be doing everything we can to ensure its efficacy is enhanced. While we certainly plan to do everything we can with our existing technology to make sure our content is as easy to index as possible from Google, we are also considering beefing up the underlying technology for our search functionality to make search even more powerful on our site. Expect to hear more from us on this soon.

How do you plan to accommodate gray area programs that might not fit nicely under a certain category?
This questions is in regard to the information architecture of the new site. We are going to do everything we can to ensure things don’t get lost in the shuffle. As I said during the meeting, a big part of this redesign process is actually just a lot of reorganization. Think about when you’re working on a home decorating project. If you’re working on a bedroom and you plan to paint, put new flooring in, switch out all the doors, add storage, etc. chances are a critical part of the project will be reorganizing all the stuff you have in that room. The same goes for websites. We’ll be doing a lot of work to put everything in its place and much of that work will require face to face contact between us and the folks who maintain their respective portion of the EWU website.

How is this project related to the Intranet/Portal project?
While the projects are related, they are not the same. Much work will have to be done to determine what content from our external site should be moved to the intranet. While we know there is a fair amount out there on our external site that can be moved internally, we’re not entirely sure how much at this point. Be assured that our goal during this process is to make things as seamless as possible for both content providers (all of us) and content consumers (the end user). These projects’ teams are working very closely together to find the best possible solution for everyone involved.

I didn’t receive the email about this meeting, how do I find out when the next one is happening?
You need to make sure you’re on the EWU Web listsrv. You can contact Betsy Knox to add yourself to the list.

What if my area of the site is working just fine and I get good feedback about it? Are you going to start me over from square one?
Great work! I’m always glad to hear when someone’s site is doing well. While we certainly don’t want you to have to start over from square one, we will sit down with you to make you aware of what kinds of changes are happening and how your site will fit into the new site map. If there are changes to be made, we’ll assess each change carefully to first ensure no critical functionality or information is lost in the transition and also make recommendations as to how you can best move forward with your site in this new context while maintaining superior usability.

Is anything being done about CMS usability?
First, we’ll be upgrading to Ingeniux 6. A couple main things come with version 6 that should make it a little less daunting to use:

1. Cross-browser, cross-platform capability (i.e., you can use CMS in browsers and operating systems other than IE on Windows XP)
2. The text editor is changing to TinyMCE, a much more powerful and usable piece of software than the previous text editor. This should help a lot!

In addition to these changes, we’re currently in the process of evaluating how we can make content creation in CMS easier for everyone. While we’re not able to completely swap the software out for new software, there is a lot of potential within CMS to be very usable and very powerful.

Also in the works are more workshops and trainings around not only CMS, but website theory in general. It is our hope that we can offer more venues for CMS users to gather and share some tips & tricks with each other as well as learn more about how to make CMS a very useful and powerful tool for your communication efforts.

When will the next version of CMS be available to use?
With the redesign. After we complete user testing on wireframes and a more complete revised information architecture for the site, we’ll begin creating the new map in CMS. There is also work to be done in terms of revisiting how page types work in CMS and what templates will be made available or revised for everyone’s use. Having said that, it’s tough to say when exactly CMS will be made available for use by everyone. The plan is to have folks into it before the redesign goes live. I’m hoping that some time later this summer or in the fall we’ll be able to start getting our feet wet with it. I’ll of course keep you updated as I’m more certain on where we’re at with timeline.

We’re in the trenches. How do you know what we need/don’t need?
A great question! I’m available any time to talk about questions and concerns. Please do not hesitate to email me, call me, send me a telegram, drop by my office…whatever! Also, don’t hesitate to post here on the blog and through the EWU web listsrv! Those are great venues to keep the dialogue flowing! I promise I’ll do my best to tell you everything I know as I know it, so let’s keep the communication floodgates wide open because it is probably the single most critical hurdle to our success on this project!

web redesign meeting recap

Thanks everyone who came to the web redesign meeting today in JFK. As I said in the meeting, I appreciate the questions you bring up — and one of the only ways we can know about your concerns or questions is if you bring them up with us directly. We certainly don’t want to make this process one where folks are feeling like they’ve been left behind in the project’s dust. That’s one of the reasons behind this blog — to provide a place where you can find out information about the project and give feedback as you feel necessary.

I know some of you were unable to make it and so I’m posting the brief status update I handed out at the meeting. Some of the information contained in the pdf is redundant from what you’ve already read on the blog, but there’s also information in there about where we’re going from here.

You can find the PDF version of the handout here.

Also, here are a few other university sites where we think they’ve done a nice job with their navigation, functionality and/or design. This isn’t an exhaustive list as we’ve checked out a ton of other sites out there that have done a nice job (both university sites as well as other non-university sites). If you’re interested in more examples let me know!

Biola University
Virginia Tech
University of Nebraska Lincoln
Appalachian State

And finally, here are some of the very early wireframes we have worked out. These are right now in the middle of being refined and adjusted in preparation for user testing (read: these are early wireframes and are by no means meant to indicate a final direction or decision). But they ought to get folks thinking about the new site map as well as site functionality.

Wireframe A (done by Klundt-Hosmer)

Wireframe B – Screen 1
Wireframe B – Screen 2
Wireframe B – Screen 3
Wireframe B – Screen 4
Wireframe B – Screen 5
Wireframe B – Screen 6

Wireframe C – Screen 1
Wireframe C – Screen 2
Wireframe C – Screen 3
Wireframe C – Screen 4

(We have more wireframes on the way and when they’re spruced up and functional, I’ll post again…but consider these food for thought until then.)

Thanks again to everyone who came and to those of you who continue to read this blog and are interested in the project! I’m looking forward to meeting with you all again soon.

“dorms” vs. “residence halls”

Here’s a thought…

A lot of you know that as a University we have a lot of words for things that can often be construed as jargon. What *we* call something at our University might not be what *everyone else* calls it.

Our site search statistics demonstrate this. Let’s talk about housing on campus. Most of us refer to the housing we offer here as “Residence Halls” or something thereabout. But when you talk to a current student or incoming student, they’ll refer to them as “dorms” or simply “housing.” So what do the search stats say?

Ranked #619: residence halls
Ranked #156: dorms
Ranked #24: housing

The problem with this is, the search term “residence halls” actually yields better results in the search. Mainly because we’ve created our content with how we refer to it at the forefront. When in reality, most people looking for this info are using either “dorms” or “housing” as their search terms.

So what’s the difference in how many people are performing these searches? Here are the number of people off campus searching with these terms (in a 4-month time period):

housing: 8,950
dorms: 1,366 (“dorm” singular yields another 317)
residence halls: 376

There you have it!

So what are some other things we might call something internally that folks outside the University are calling completely different? Filling this gap can make the website easier for people to use.