Are you trying to fit ten pounds into this bag?
You can’t fit ten pounds of sh-tuff in a five-pound bag. That’s the (cliché) analogy I included in one of my slides for a content workshop I am doing this morning. I’ve been thinking a lot about web content lately.
A few weeks ago at work, we had the CEO of our web development firm, mStoner come to campus to conduct a web content development workshop — this was for two groups of campus users over two days. This was part of our web redesign project – and since we’re up to the content training, you can bet we’re nearing the finish line in just a few months.
Voltaire’s presentation was wonderful—and it really validated what I know about web content. There are a few points that stuck with me from his workshop, some I already knew, but they are now top of mind again. I’ll discuss two of them here. While this session was geared toward college and university websites, the same can really be said about any business website so, read on even if you aren’t in higher ed.
Unchart Your Territory: The User Doesn’t Care About the Organizational Chart of Your Organization
Higher ed websites can easily fall into the trap of creating its information architecture (IA) based on the way the organizational chart flows. This department reports to this office, so it must live there online, right? Wrong. Never been ‘wronger’! (misspelling intended for dramatic purposes) The IA must be logically built the way users would expect to find it. Say Joe at the grocery store is in charge of ordering all the boxed snacks, but due to some restructuring, he’s also in charge of the ice cream. But not the rest of the freezer foods. Would he really put the Cookies-n-Cream next to the Tollhouse just because he’s responsible for the order? No. He’d put it in the freezer, where it makes sense for that item to go. That’s a very elementary analogy, but it illustrates my point.
Voltaire suggested a great exercise to help build a solid IA – index card sorting. Write down services/tasks/offices on index cards and have various people sort them into logical groupings. Use that data to build the IA. You can use this for your main navigation, as well as audience gateway pages built as quick links to frequently used pages.
Give More Doors: You Can’t Serve Everyone Equally on Your Homepage
The analogy I used at the beginning of the article is most fitting here. Sure, you can have your users scroll a bit. However, you cannot make the homepage so busy that the end user has no idea where to go next. A user of any website will decide in less than ten seconds whether he will stay on your site or not. Don’t make it cluttered. As we learned from hours of reality TV hoarder shows, nobody likes a pack rat. Consolidate! Don’t try to fit too much into that bag.
I am a huge fan of The Oatmeal. It’s totally coincidental that I found his recent cartoon, What I Want from a Restaurant Website on the eve of the writing of this blog post. So happy I found it so I could include it. His hysterical (at least I think so) comic mocks the mistakes many website owners make. The Oatmeal says he wants the menu, specials, directions, hours and a reservations system. But, what he gets on restaurant websites is an obnoxious flash website, a downloadable (oversized) PDF menu and a message from the owner in a cheesy font. Folks, The Oatmeal only mocks the truth. This is so on target. His restaurant website cartoon is a great lesson in many things, mainly that you have to shove your personal preferences aside and think about your users. What do they want? And, how can you give them what they want quickly and easily?
One of Voltaire’s points—and something I read on many higher ed blogs – is that you must separate the internal from the external. A website’s homepage can cater to mainly prospective students with brand messaging, story-telling and topic-based navigation to main areas of the website – About, Academics, Admissions, Athletics, etc. But, through the use of audience gateways, task-based navigation and special call-out features, such as news and events, the website also caters to repeat visitors. And, those news and events, while geared toward the general campus community, also serve as a marketing tool to prospective students – just seeing an active campus can make a potential student feel included. That’s a condensed explanation – whole training sessions are spent on the homepage.
Gateway Pages are For Friends
There are several ways in which users can access info - just train them which door to use.
Also, I already mentioned those audience gateways, but remember to use them to the fullest. I threw on a third heading here even though I mentioned I’d only cover two. Bonus. Free of charge.
Think about this. First time visitors to your house – sales people, delivery people and new friends there for the first time – will usually go to your front door. But, what about those folks you feel comfortable with – your friends, your family, the people who come over all the time? They use the back door, right?
Just think of all those TV sitcoms. Family members barged in without even a knock through the back door (usually through the kitchen, usually looking for Raymond or Laura), while unexpected guests came in through the front — ringing the doorbell and all. Of course, this does not work for our Friends who live in apartments, but you get my drift.
The same can be said for these audience gateways. First time visitors to your website will enter through the homepage (or perhaps another page if they come directly from a search engine.) But, once that person becomes a student, staff or faculty member, they can be trained to go right to the “Current Students” page or the “Faculty/Staff” page to get where they need to go. They don’t need to navigate through the site anymore, they don’t need to read through the marketing messages and read about the College and programs. They just need to accomplish a task – checking their email, pay a bill, register for a class, find a phone number or order transcripts.
In summary…
So, two of my website pet peeves were addressed at that training session a few weeks ago and I was inspired to share them through this blog (sorry so late!). And, that these two areas–hodgepodge homepages and nonsense navigation–were discussed by another pro in the field shows that these are not just my pet peeves, but true issues in web design and usability, true mistakes people are still making.
What website pet peeves to you have when it comes to college and university websites? And, for the sake of The Oatmeal, how about restaurant websites?