Why does web design in higher ed suck?

In my last post I offered a critique of the (not-so) new University of Waterloo home page. The next question is, how do these things happen?

Before I get started, I’d like to be clear that the points offered up in this post are gross generalizations, and certainly wouldn’t apply to all universities. These are just some of the issues I experienced at Waterloo—there are others that I won’t go into. I’m sure people who work at UW or other universities can think of additional factors to add. These points are also referencing the home page, although most of the factors listed apply to the rest of the web space as well.

Those of you who are familiar with web design in higher ed have surely seen the infamous venn diagram cartoon from xkcd:

When this was originally posted I remember seeing some talk about “web managers” not understanding usability. At least in my experience (as a former university web manager), that’s not the case at all. There are several problems at the root of this:

• University home pages are highly sensitive political objects. This can manifest itself in several different ways. Influential people may get upset if their department or project isn’t featured prominently enough. Marketing and communications staff want to keep these people happy, so they give in. In the above diagram, the Alumni profiles may be there because the director of alumni relations cozied up to the director of communications. There can also be a lot of butthurt from people if they think another department or faculty is featured more prominently than theirs is. This is a complex web to navigate. Pleasing these people is important.
• Core internal audiences (mainly faculty & staff) are resistant to change. They get used to navigating in a certain way. They use the website to do their work. If links or navigation change, it throws them off. Once I changed a label of a link on the home page, and some of the second-level naviagation, and was told (from a senior VP, indirectly of course) that I should let the campus community know about changes like that in advance.
• Universities have a lot of target audiences. Prospective students, current students, graduate students, undergraduate students, international students, faculty, staff, prospective faculty, researchers at other universities, parents, government, donors, prospective donors, local residents, and the list goes on. And all of these audiences want different things. As I mentioned in my previous post, the “external” audiences are considered to be more important. But this clashes with the internal people who will complain to the right people if they don’t like something. It’s difficult to compromise the needs of those groups.
• Web managers don’t have the appropriate level of authority and empowerment. We  are four levels down the hierarchy and aren’t considered to be important enough to make decisions. (I think this is also combined with a general and relatively widespread belief, also outside of higher ed, that web designers don’t have high level skills or expertise, but that’s another discussion). If there’s no empowerment, then nothing can get better because nobody with the appropriate expertise is responsible for it.
• The people who do have the authority don’t have the interest. They were hired to do traditional communications and public relations. They legitimately have a lot of other things to do with, and since web isn’t their area of expertise it continually falls off the radar. In my experience they can also be rather out of touch with the audience (Yes, they really think you’re interested in the promotions for campus events).
• There is never enough money to do things properly. In most cases, university web departments, like many other administrative groups and departments, are underfunded. Institutions of higher education are usually unable to match the importance of the web in their day-to-day operations with the appropriate level of staffing. I ran the central web properties with myself and a co-op student. This included responsibility for maintaining the back-end applications that made these sites work. This isn’t uncommon.
• Getting more money is important. Don’t blame the university—increasing government cuts have meant that universities have to rely more and more on other sources of funding. Institutions are competing with each other for private donations, research grants, and full-cost tuition from international students. This is why you often see things like research profiles on the home page. Universities are now hiring marketing managers from outside of higher ed. These are the people who decide that the website is a marketing tool for external audiences, not an information-retrieval tool for students and staff.
• Things take time. I don’t know about other universities and colleges, but at least in my experience there can be a general assumption that things just take time, and that’s the way it is. You can’t expect to get things done expediently. Since the web manager doesn’t have any authority, an array of committees are often created to “advise” senior management on every conceivable issue. Of course, these take forever. Major changes might need to get approval from senior people, who are usually either busy or away for some reason. And everyone knows that nothing gets done in August or December.

After all of this, a certain sense of inertia sets in. It’s too difficult and complicated to make changes, so you just avoid it. A lot of the things on the home page have probably been there for the past 10 years and nobody is willing or able to change them. By that point the website has gotten into such a bad state that you legitimately do need a redesign. Incremental change isn’t going to cut it. At least with a big redesign you can make a big deal about it and convince people that change will be good.

With the Waterloo redesign the first two points played out a bit differently, in that they were able to overcome a lot of opposition from those people by sheer force of will (not without upsetting people). But I think most of the other factors had a significant impact. There wasn’t enough money to pay a vendor to do a proper job. There was no web manager with an appropriate level of authority to oversee the project. Making a big marketing “impact” was a key objective of the project.

I think that any redesign is doomed to fail if the above points (or whatever else caused the problems) aren’t rectified. The site will just degenerate into a useless and chaotic mess, and you’ll have to do it all over again.

Content strategy and Governance are two hot topics in higher ed web discussions these days. A lot of the issues I mentioned above fall within those two realms. I am a bit wary of topics like this because I think you’d end up needing a committee for that, which would take a year. Then you have a big report that nobody reads, and need to get a decision from someone higher up, which takes 6 months. By then everyone’s forgotten about it, and you still don’t have a person or group who is actually able to take responsibility for your web space.

As a sidenote, I think these reasons also cause many higher ed redesigns to end up at more or less the same point. Witness Oxford vs. University of Toronto (big horizontal photo, boxes of links in a grid, blue). Or how about College of William and Mary vs. Dalhousie? (big photo with promo stuff on top; more promo stuff in a horizontal row of boxes below; horizontal main nav; utility tools at the top, green). Similar problems often lead to similar solutions.

Comments are moderated. Come to think of it, I think I’ll do that on all my posts… looks like I’ll need to find a module plugin to do that.

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