Schedule Updates

We've completed a lot of things so far in our redesign: We interviewed a diverse slice of the School's community, got input from the majority of constituents through an online survey, and we worked with our Web advisory board to settle issues around our site architecture.

And now the fun begins!

In the coming days LMD will show us Two Home Page Design Drafts, and we will post these designs online and launch a second online survey to get your input. Once we have your input we'll have an open forum around May 19 to reveal the final designs.

We will have a Beta Launch of the site towards the end of June, with usability testing to take place. Tentatively, we plan to launch the live site (given we adhere to our deadlines and production moves along) by the middle of July.

Stay tuned!

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.

Creative Brief Complete. Survey Responses Tallied.

With the Creative Brief complete, LMD is working on site architecture revisions. Here are the findings of the survey:

TOP-LINE RESEARCH FINDINGS

Public’s Perception of UMSON
Based on the interviews conducted and responses from an online questionnaire, UMSON is perceived as a solid institution among alumni, faculty/staff, and current students. Adjectives such as prestigious, challenging, forward-thinking, and inspiring were utilized to describe the school.

Although most comments were positive, a common reference to some shortcomings came to surface, particularly from the current student group.

Survey participants were asked to verbalize what they believed to be UMSON strengths. Common comments across all groups were related to excellence in education at an affordable price as well as the prestigious faculty and leadership. Valuable research opportunities also were listed as an important characteristic of the school. The fact that UMSON is ranked among the top 10 schools in the country adds an immense level of credibility and pride to be associated with UMSON across all groups.

When participants were asked to mention unique attributes about the school in comparison to other schools of nursing, national ranking, prestigious faculty, geographical location, variety of academic programs, research opportunities, and affordability were the common themes among all participants.

Public’s Perception of Current UMSON Website
Participants were asked to rate the current UMSON website on quality and organization of the information, visual design, and overall usability on a scale of 1-3, with one being excellence and 3 being poor. The average score among ~133 participants was a 2; however, the most improvement was required on the areas of usability, content organization, and visual design. Some comments from the survey include:

• "A single calendar that let us know what is happening in the SON and around the campus."
• "There are so many items in the drop-down menus. Should be fewer."
• "Reorganize links, improve the ease of navigation."
• "Update information and check accuracy. It is hard to find needed information."
• "Separate intranet and logins for student and faculty users as distinct from public."
• "Definitely highlight school ranking."
• "Add streaming videos/clips of commentaries about the strength of the programs by successful alumni in various leadership positions across the country/world in various specialties of nursing."
• "Make sure the search feature is very robust to cover all of the specialties that the school offers."

About the New Site
Survey participants visit the UMSON site an average of three to four times per week, mainly to access the Blackboard application, share drives, access the faculty and staff directory, and to keep up with relevant school news. A number of students express concern with regard to timely postings.

Participants express interest in having a highly interactive website to help improve overall communication. A few examples include adding online course listings, a centralized calendar of events, improved site search capability, links to commonly used application such as Blackboard, and SURF on the home page to facilitate access.

In addition, participants express the need for a better site architecture in order to decrease repetitiveness of information as well as facilitate site navigation. The implementation of photographs conveying the school dynamics is very important. A few examples included photos of student in clinical and academic settings, shots portraying student life on campus, and faculty student interaction. Other items such as student blogs, streaming video, and social networking were mentioned as tools that could improve communication across campus as well as connect current students and alumni with school initiatives.

Creative Brief Update

We're putting last minute edits together for the creative brief (based on our survey and interviews), and later this week I will post excerpts from that creative for comment.

Thank you for participating!

We had 124 people respond to our survey. Results will be posted soon for your commenting.

Survey Wrapping Up Sunday

Don't forget to participate in the Web survey! I'm taking it down Sunday, and will post survey results shortly.

Don't Forget to Participate!

We had a very productive week as we continue our information gathering prior to moving into wire-framing and prototyping.

Bilaal, Hector, and Mike from LMD came to the School to visit with the Web Advisory Board (representatives from across the SON community) and to meet with Administrative Council (senior staff). These were dynamic, productive meetings and those who participated were able to engage LMD with questions of audience, brand, and the like.

Our interviews are just about wrapped up as well as our online survey. Don't lose out by not participating in these preliminary questions that will provide a framework for the redesign to move forward.

Visit https://nursing.umaryland.edu/cgi-bin/rws3.pl?FORM=WebsiteRedesign to complete the survey. Your input is very valuable to us! And please distribute the survey link to others who might like to weigh in on the School's site.

Please note: The survey will be up until the beginning of February.

Here is some of LMD's work >>