Drew Olanoff attended “The Usability Drive Homepage: Design a User-Centered Approach,” a presentation given by Matthew Winkel (The College of New Jersey) yesterday at EduWeb. Drew sent this report this morning.
Matthew Winkel started off by talking about indirect and direct marketing techniques, but the main theme of his presentation was brand testing.
User feedback is their first approach when coming up with the phases of their site’s redesign process. They asked current and former students what they thought about the site, and designed based on that. They brought students in and videotaped them going through the site, seeing who could find things and how long it took. They did about 15 hours of student interviews before and after the process as well. The results were amazing, once they redesigned their sites, the same students were finding things 10 times faster and also noted that they now liked the website.
An example of registering for parking was used. None of the students could ever find that information, but TCNJ now has the ability to move the most important news to their homepage at key points of the year.
They also noted that the use of Flash isn’t bad on a website, but just to make it easy to navigate. Also, A-Z navigation is a good idea, along with a “Suggest a link†area. As soon as they put that feature up, they got about 20 useful links submitted by students.
The key to their success was mentoring students to become web developers. It’s something they suggest that all schools do. The students were passionate with making their schools website better, and learned valuable design techniques and skills.
Great session, with the underlying theme of “Get feedback before AND after you redesign your site.†A website is never done, it’s always ongoing, and having something you can tweak easily is the way to go.