Chances are you’ve heard about (or suffered from ;-) the dreaded website redesign by committee: a group of stakeholders making life and death decisions on the design created by the Web team or the external agency.
With the help of usability advocates like Steve Krug, more and more institutions have tried to balance this approach with a more user-centered process: educated decisions based on metrics, trends and the results of real testing done with members of target audiences.
To make the process even more transparent, a few higher ed teams in charge of their website redesign (Cornell, Duke, Ball State, etc.) have chosen to blog about it inviting feedback and comments from anybody.
As announced yesterday in a blog post titled “Facebook Sneak Preview,” the popular social networking website has decided to push the idea a bit further by inviting comments about the plans for its next redesign via a Facebook group(Facebook login required).
If you are a Web professional, you should probably try to follow closely this initiative as you might be able to use the same approach for your next redesign project..
Given the popularity of Facebook among our main target audience of students, it could be a great way to get input about any upcoming website redesign. Moreover, it could be used to gather feedback from prospective students – usually a pretty hard to reach target in this specific situation since they don’t have any formal link with your institution yet.
Have any of you already tried this approach? What do you think about it?
I’ve been commenting up a storm, but as I pointed out to them, they really don’t do a very good job of publicizing this group / event; many more would be interested in participating than are.