More to Come After Independence Day...

Early next week we will be meeting with those associated with the Centers of Excellence in Research to discuss templates and how those unique "Center" pages will look.

Other than that we're in the process of finalizing the site as it is built. Up to this point we were dealing mainly with images and mock ups designed in Photoshop, and now we've begun the process of breaking up those images into actual Web pages.

This is all being done behind the scenes and should be fully developed and ready for testing in a few weeks.

Stay tuned, and enjoy your holiday weekend!

Moving Ahead with Site Development

With feedback taken into account from everything we've done to this point: the open forum, the blog, surveys, interviews, emails, and meetings -- we are moving ahead with the actual development of the new site.

The approved designs (homepage and secondary page) will be sliced and diced, as they are brought to life via the scripting of XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

That means that the designs will become interactive as we move into July. We should be able to begin alpha testing in July and beta testing in August.

If you'd like to help out with testing our new site please contact me via email or leave a comment on the blog and I will get in touch with you.

The Second Survey Is Complete!

423 people took survey!

Design Preferences:

• 278 preferred the red design
• 109 preferred the yellow design
• 33 liked both designs
  

Survey Demographics:

• 110 Alumni
• 67 Current Students
• 38 Faculty Members
• 10 Friends or Donors
• 119 Other
• 33 Prospective Students
• 37 Staff Members
• 3 UM System Employees

Select Comments:

• Nice top navigation…
• The design is unlike many other websites
• Love "By the Numbers" section -- assuming facts will rotate?
• The label for the red buttons aren't consistent
• Remember, you should also include an area where ALERTS will be posted to the home page
• Apply Now ribbon items are too prominent for their station; will be utilized less than other items Very top in black frame- "Apply now" ribbon, makes it too busy What's the difference between public affairs and media?
• I would create a distinction between the Upcoming Events and Recent News
• Size of links differentiates what is most important to the site; student login should be bolder on top right permanent position
• The "buttons" under the photo make the site VERY easy to navigate
• I like that the page is not cluttered with text or pictures--everything stands out, and this makes it easy to find information on the page. I don't know about your navigation structure, but i would expect it not to be too cluttered...
• The page seems designed for 1024x768 screens, but the image still has some horizontal scrolling that I hope will not be necessary on the actual site
• My monitor is set for 1024 wide and I had to scroll to see the page
• My primary concern is that there are 4 menus to consider. The site is very clean and directed to the events and main red buttons, but the other nav (2 on top one on right) are lost because we are not expecting to look for multiple navigation menus
• I noticed that it does not fit on my monitor
• The school colors are incorporated in a cool way i would spend more time at this site
• It is very eye-catching and i really feel the need to navigate that design much more
• I like the easy to find link to Shady Grove
• Concept one is simple and efficient ,representative of the nursing professional in general
• Overall, I think this design is a fresher look and more items "pop"
• Much more aesthetically pleasing, there is better contrast between the bottom "upcoming events" part and the side tabs in grey so they are more easily found, the tabs to click on are only on the right side making the website more organized and less cluttered. The red design is overall a much better choice
• Well, for prospective students, it is easy to find where to apply
• I love it! I love the upcoming event and recent view area. I love the links to the right in gray. I love the pictures leading to news events. I really like this! Much better then the current site. And I LOVE BY THE NUMBERS!!!
• This website allows students to envision themselves in a vibrant and diverse student population. These students look like up and coming young professionals
• I like the color combination, they remind me of the school colors, the singular list of links on the right keeps the look clean
• Fresh, professional, inviting
• Holds attention with colors and layout. Seems to reach out to the reader (me). Easier to move around on the page
• Upbeat
• Innovative, easy to understand, good colors, logical formatting
• Easy to see the upcoming events and recent news
• Clarity, color, and 3 d wrap
• The "information for" section in the right hand column is better than going across the top in design 2
• 3D design – it’s awesome!!
• Very clear, clean, professional, yet gives a good visual identity of the School.
• I prefer the red background; I think it is more eye-catching. I also like the illusion that banners wrap around the white foreground.
• I like the colors and crispness of the look. I like that there are tabs for everything so that you do not have to hunt for what you are looking for.
• Seeing them side-by-by side, I realize I like having items on only one side of the photo; the yellow background concept feels more cluttered because there is something around the photo on all sides that I need (or should) pay attention too and therefore I'm not sure what to focus on
• I’d like to see a merger of both – layout from 2 with colors of 1

The Winner Is!

More to come soon....

Architecture Update and Card Sorting Workshop

We had an amazing card sorting workshop yesterday during our web advisory board meeting.

Card sorting is a simple technique in usability design where a group of "users" are guided to generate a category tree or find a way of grouping items into useful bins. It is great approach for designing work-flows, menu structures, or, in this case, Web site navigation paths.

We had an idea, walking to the meeting, about how our architecture might look but we wanted to open up the conversation to our advisory board. We were very happy with the results, and the fact that our board was able to help us come to some good decisions about the overall navigation of the site.

We started by having all content grouped together in unorganized piles on one wall and asks four different groups to organize them in "buckets" along another wall. We also got some feedback as far as renaming some bucket headings. All in all, it was a fun activity, and we all learned something about how users might categorize some of our Web content.

Here's how the exercise went:

Jane, Marjorie, and Karen discuss how they might organize things:

Sandy and Rosemary discuss how to group things too. We broke our board into four groups, and each group had to figure out how to group content together on the opposite wall:

Sue is posting some notes on the wall as Jane consults with Marjorie and Karen across the room:
Once time was up we discussed the choices, and determined if we needed to shift things around -- given audience needs and general organizational ideas:

Here are the results of the board's work:

This is the full architecture: Note that there are three ways to access Web content: through user type (think demographics), task (think quick links), or by subject (our card sorting exercise was based exclusively on the subject-based way of navigating). Click to see a larger image.