Jul 27 2011 at 11:07pm
Thoughts on the University of Waterloo redesign
I’ve recently come across blog posts from earlier this year about redesigning on spec, and redesign and problem solving. This is timely, because I’ve been working on this post about the uWaterloo web redesign for some time now. I think this is a case where there was a lot of “design” done for the sake of impact without actually solving problems. Now that I don’t work there anymore, I’m free to make some honest comments it. How refreshing!
Until recently I was the “web manager” for the central Communications department. I was on maternity leave for most of the redesign process, but I did make some plans for it before I left (that weren’t used, to my knowledge), and worked intimately with the delivered designs after I got back. There are some things I really like about it, and some things I really don’t. I’m going to focus on the home page here, since I think that’s what where a lot of problems are. The other areas are okay, particularly some of the content and information architecture.
I’m going to refer to Jared Spool’s wisdom throughout this article. I attended his workshop on “Designing for Content-Rich Sites” at DrupalCon in March, I think his work is very relevant here.
Screen real estate and the photo
It’s a big risk to sacrifice all your screen real estate for the sake of impact. Doing this automatically makes it harder to find anything, since there are very few navigational links available. Users can’t quickly scan to find their trigger words (more on that later). They have to work for it.
This might be an interesting idea in the appropriate context, but University websites are informational in nature. People are there to find content. Often boring content. Course descriptions. Financial aid information. Names and contact information.
In a November, 2010 article on Photos as Content, Jakob Nielsen points out that:
Some types of pictures are completely ignored. This is typically the case for big feel-good images that are purely decorative.
On a practical level, it’s also very difficult to find an appropriate photo that works in that space. It has to work with the words on top of it, and the four links on the right side. It can’t look funny when the slide-down panels are open. It has to be big enough to work when it extends to the left at high resolutions but also fit well in the 1024px box at low resolutions. It has to work when the box expands vertically as well (try resizing your window, or zooming out and you’ll see what I mean). And it has to communicate a strong marketing “message”.
Trigger words and the scent of information
Spool talks a lot about the “scent of information” and “trigger words”. When people come to a site they have an idea of what they’re looking for. They have certain words in mind, that may or may not match the words used on the site. Spool calls these “trigger words” – the words that trigger a user to click (The Right Trigger Words, 2004).
The scent of information describes the process of looking for this content on a site. Link labels and text content lead users around the site in search of content. The scent comes from trigger words, and it should get stronger as the user gets closer to their goal.
According to Spool, the home page has one purpose: to get the user to the content page they want. They don’t care about what’s on the home page, they are about the content they’re looking for (DrupalCon workshop). Based on Spool’s research:
… users were far more successful at finding their targets when the description words, which they told us before they saw the site, appeared on the home page. In the tasks where users successfully found their target content, the description words appeared on the home page 72% of the time. When users were unsuccessful, their words only appeared an average of 6% of the time on the home page. (The Right Trigger Words, 2004)
Because most of the screen is taken up by the photo, there are very few useful links to chose from on this page. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for you have to try the audience links and hope for the best. Navigational paths get more complex, which reduces the chances of success.
The “Panel” content
The main content on the home page is in the “panels” that drop down from the main navigation bar. The bulk of this content isn’t new. The About Us section will have some new content (and very well written content, from what I’ve seen). Most of the “Today at Waterloo” content was on the home page before. The Faculties & Academics and Offices & Services panels are improved designs of previously existing content.
My problem with the latter two sections is that you have to know what you’re looking for in order to use them. There are a lot of links in those scrolling boxes, and you need to do a bit of work to find the one you want. It wouldn’t work well if you didn’t know exactly what the link you needed was called, or had to choose between multiple possible paths. This might work well for internal audiences, but I’m guessing external groups would have trouble. If it was up to me, I would have put links to those two pages near the search box and made them accessible from every page. Useful secondary links, but not appropriate as a primary method of navigation.
The home page is for “external” audiences
One of the overriding premises behind this design is that the website is for “external” audiences—prospecitve students, international students, donors, government etc. “Internal” audiences (students, faculty, and staff) are supposed to use the audience links in the top-right.
One of the more controversial changes that was made was removing the links to the internal tools (email, course management system, library, student information system etc.). In the old design, these were on the home page, and roughly 65% of visitors to the home page clicked them. Students, faculty, and staff, used them almost every day. Now they’re supposed to get to them from the audience links on the top-right. This is a case where the redesign has actually removed a solution to a problem entirely. These links should be more accessible, not less.
Internal audiences aren’t invalid. Removing the links they use the most sends a message that you don’t care about them. You’re just not going to solve their problems at all. Marketing people would say that the website isn’t for the internal people, it’s a marketing tool to engage the external audiences. But internal people use the site much more frequently. They need it to find information to complete their coursework or do their administrative work. It’s essential.
Even forgetting that for a moment, does the design that was implemented actually suit the needs of the external audiences? If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, how do you navigate this? Let’s say you’re a prospective graduate student wanting to know what programs Waterloo has in your discipline. How do you navigate to that information from this page? You have to go through that little “Future students” link way up in the top-right, or guess and hope you can find the right name for the department you’re looking for in the Faculties & Academics panel.
Whose needs does this suit, then? There’s a lot of “impact”. There’s supposed to be some “feature stories” that will pop-out from that right side block area, sometimes with videos (Spool: “Featured content gets clicked 1.3% of the time” – DrupalCon workshop). It’s hard to come up with any particular audience group that this design targets well.
The other page templates
There were several other page templates delivered as part of this process, with two options for the multitude of micro-sites within the Waterloo web space:
The question is: what are these templates for? Which sites should use which template? The “Institutional” template on the left looks good, but what is it for? There’s no provision for a micro-site title, so is it just for certain central pages?
The “Faculty/unit” template one on the right looks good with the various faculty colours applied, but I can tell you it’s not-so-pretty with the “Departments & Support Units” grey.
There are lots of big administrative sites, such as the Library or the Registrar’s Office. Which one should they use? The one that’s ugly in “Departments & Support Units” grey, or the one that doesn’t have a space for the site title?
These designs are partway there. They look good, but they don’t solve the right problems. One of the biggest problems a large-ish University has is the variety of micro-sites it needs to accommodate. Small sites, large sites, academic sites, marketing sites, administrative sites, etc.
Solving problems like this should have been the point of a redesign project. Heck, that should be the point of any design project. Design without problem solving is art. A website for a university is not art.
Wrapping up
Stay tuned for my next post, where I’ll discuss some of the reasons why things like this happen to university websites.
Comments are moderated on this post. Feel free to comment anonymously if you have something interesting to say.
Also Relevant
- Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Jakob Nielsen, 2009)
- The new Redesign Must Die talk (Louis Rosenfeld, 2011)
Both of these sources include examples from higher education.
Jaymis July 28th, 2011 at 1:06 pm
Looking forward to your next post and thoughts on “why things like this” happen…
Jesse Rodgers July 28th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Great thoughts, kudos to you for posting them.
Not sure I totally agree with it all but I certainly don’t disagree
Matt Clare July 28th, 2011 at 1:44 pm
But the “Internal” audiences won’t give an additional money? Why cater to them?
Great post, I enjoyed reading it.
Jason Pontius July 28th, 2011 at 1:53 pm
Hi Megan,
I’m glad you feel free to post your real thoughts about the redesign now that you’ve left UW; I wish you’d felt free to post them while still employed there!
I agree with some of the things you’ve said here, and disagree with others; blogs are designed to facilitate conversations, and if that happens here, I’d love to join the conversation. For now let me just make a couple of points:
• I love the XKCD cartoon just like everyone else. But the one big thing Randall leaves off that Venn diagram is one of the biggest things visitors want from a site: an answer to the question “What kind of place is this?” That’s obviously a primary interest of a first-time visitor or prospective student— who needs a reason to care about a school before seeking out specific information— but it’s just as important for current students. It feels great when your school has an awesome website, and whether this particular homepage is “awesome” or not, that’s a totally valid goal for a homepage design.
• It’s impossible for every piece of information that everyone wants to be on a homepage. (I mean, it’s possible, but would render a page unreadable.) The typical way to address this is to make some judgments about which links make the cut and which don’t— as a result, someone’s always left pissed off. The approach this homepage takes is the opposite: Almost EVERYONE who’s looking for a particular link on the homepage has to click *something* first. If you’re the sort of person who wants the right links at your fingertips all the time, you’d be best off bookmarking a gateway page (http://uwaterloo.ca/gateway/current-students/), specifically designed for that purpose; the homepage is there to convey a “spirit of the institution,” and get you to the right jumping-off point for whatever you’re looking for.
• Problem solving was an ENORMOUS part of the Waterloo redesign— as I’m sure you know from the many pages of documentation and strategy produced along with the design mockups. I completely agree that design without strategy is window dressing, but I don’t think that’s what this homepage is.
I don’t see this homepage as directed solely toward external audiences at all. I think — and of COURSE I’m biased, being one of the two people who designed it — that its intention is to be for everyone at Waterloo. (The “You” isn’t just prospective students— that line was actually taken from something said by a graduate student, Sospeter Gatobu, in one of our dozens of student/faculty/staff meetings on campus.)
If you look at the original redesign blog comment thread from when this design leaked (http://web.uwaterloo.ca/story/waterloo-belongs-you), I hope you’ll see that many students, faculty and staff seem to intuitively understand the ideas behind it. By no means are all the comments positive— there are some good critiques there too, many of which led to revisions— but even before the panels and other tools were rolled out, it seems to have fared pretty well.
I’m sorry that your maternity leave kept you from meeting us during one of our many campus visits— but then again, I’m also envious of Canada’s incredibly generous maternity leave policies.
Keep up the good work.
Jason Pontius, White Whale Web Services
Megan July 28th, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Yeah, that’s how they like to rationalize it. Except that students become alumni. Students or faculty may found extremely successful startup companies with lots of money to donate later. They might want to keep that in mind!
Thanks for the comments, and for reading the whole thing
Jesse Rodgers July 28th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
@Matt — because your business suffers as a result. If you watch how the front line staff use the uwaterloo web it is basically their reference library for servicing students. You interrupt their jobs when you move stuff or delete it or don’t update it. The fix for that is simple, remove all that from the public web and have a marketing front for what lives at the main url. But the cost to that is breaking literally millions of inbound links to the uwaterloo web space. You know what that does to your google fu and thus your marketing effort?
Jaymis July 28th, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Personally, I like the redesign, but I must admit, I like it most because it is change. I like change. But, I am also a pragmatic individual and I realize that no redesign is ever going to please everyone at all times. Some will love it and never want to change it, others will hate it and be ready at the gate with torches and pitchforks. There is no perfect answer, and to try and find a perfect answer will result in a lot of hair-pulling and frustration. To me, frequent change is best solution for divergent groups/tastes and opinions (with some constraints) as it is at least provides some basic variety, interest, and can be used (when used properly) to address the concerns of the chorus of voices demanding that they be heard. I feel the home pages attempts this with the changing background, the background image is a powerful tool that I don’t think has been used to its full potential (yet). Enough metaphor from me.
Jaymis July 28th, 2011 at 2:35 pm
@Jesse – I’ve said it before; I feel that a lot of the internal vs external conflict could be solved by having a different home page appear to anyone on the 129.97.XXX.XXX domain vs all other external traffic. Staff could still use the site as their reference library, and we could evolve the external version over time to something more marketing-friendly.
Megan July 28th, 2011 at 3:15 pm
@Jason – Thanks for your comments! I agree that getting a feel for the place is an important part of a Unviersity site. We could all quibble a lot with the specific items in the XFCD diagram. Look & feel is something that should be communicated through a redesign.
I don’t agree that everyone should have to click *something* first. The home page should at least make an attempt to get the right links on there so that most users can get where they need to go right away. As Spool says above, the point of a home page is to get users to where they want to go.
I was going to say more about the concept of audience gateways, but I thought the post was getting long enough as it was
I think these are useful as a way to augment existing navigation for specific audiences, but not as a primary navigation method. What if you’re not in the key audience groups? Parents? Local community members? People looking for something outside their audience group?
@Jaymis – I agree that change is good
In my follow-up I’ll talk more about why incremental change on University home pages is so difficult 
I think more incremental change along with frequent user testing and better analytics would be a very good way to deal with some of these problems.
Jesse Rodgers July 28th, 2011 at 6:22 pm
@Jason – I still *love* the design… good points.
@megan – with product sales, landing pages, metrics, etc in the startup world (where their business depends on highly effective web design and they have the numbers to prove it) the whole goal is to get someone to click on something. That is success. Offering a funnel is perfectly ok and the consumer loves it (proven by them paying for a product). Startups do A/B testing all day every day to tweak that funnel which results in incremental design changes.
University web sites are no different. There is a transaction occurring — generally its information that results in a decision.
July 28th, 2011 at 6:35 pm
Hello. I am in a position where I need to see that page everyday, and I am going to show you how the typical person visits the page.
Current student visits home page.
I look for “news”, see none. “Portal”, see none. “Bulletin”, nowhere to be found. All I can see is a giant picture of two holographic men and a plank with “1957″ written on it.
I eventually find “current students”, an item outside the main navigation – oh wait! It’s a useless bunch of links to pages I’ve already bookmarked from first year or can just Google otherwise!
Where are the news? Ah, it’s in the “Today At Waterloo” panel. Alright, there’s the daily bulletin – why is there only one item? Why don’t I just go to bulletin.uwaterloo.ca or something?
Highschool student visits home page.
The page looks… black, but with an uneasy contrast. Apple’s site is white, almost greyscale, and easy to the eyes. Alright, this university’s philosophy must be the exact *opposite* of that of Apple: not creative, not professional, not the top in the industry.
Future graduate visits home page.
I already know this university is not in the top 100, but let’s take a – oh my god – it’s irritatingly colourful. I want to leave this screen now.
Looks like they’re having a CSS malfunction or something – the wallpaper flew off the left side of the screen?
Never mind that, I’m looking for their degree programs. Programs, programs, programs. No programs. Look for “Prospective students” because that’s what every other university calls it. Prospective, prospective, prospective. I don’t think I – “future students”? Why am I put last? Am I not important?
Faculty member visits home page.
Alright, where’s science? There’s “faculty” here and “faculty & academics” there. I’ll just go for “faculty” first because I’m a faculty member. Now where IS science? Do I need to go back to the previous page? Where did the “faculty & academics” link at the top go?
Stupid site… I’ll just type science.uwaterloo.ca and find out what’s new.
Alumnus visits home page.
Graduated five years ago, let’s check out my school’s home page – holy moly, am I on the wrong site or something -
Anyway, let’s check out what reunions I can go to… (clicks on Alumni) TWO events? TA Nominations? Peace Camp? What do these things have to do with alumni?
Potential employer visits home page.
I heard Waterloo’s co-ops are top-notch. Let me go to their page. Oh wow, picture of the royal family? Is that what they learn at school?
(clicks on Employers. Fortunately, the problem here is not with the employers gateway page – it’s with the complicated hiring procedures.)
Waterloo Staff visits home page.
What’s ANY of these links on the page got to help me with my work? It doesn’t give me a calendar, it doesn’t show me the people directory – heck, it doesn’t even give me an option to import those events’ dates into Outlook.
Some argue that “splash pages” ruin the whole web browsing experience, particularly when you are here to gather information, which you very likely are. Look what we have here.
Megan July 28th, 2011 at 7:45 pm
@Jason – I should also mention that the way the photo was originally conceived and the way it’s being implemented aren’t the same. It’s gone from being an organic expression of the community to a tightly controlled top-down marketing message. I liked it a lot better under the original premise.