Designing to your Audience, not your Administration Part II: First Year Connections

Our latest effort at HSU went live a week or so ago: First Year Connections. This project was a challenge, in that it highlights 5 separate programs that are administered by 5 different groups on campus. Those of you that work at Universities probably are rolling your eyes in sympathy right now, thinking that this is the formula for a nightmare of a site. And it has been in the past, but this time we were actually able to pull off a really great campaign that includes both printed materials and a web site. I thought I’d document our process here, as much for myself as for you, my five readers, so that I can remember how to pull this off in the future. First, I have to credit the clients for realizing that it would be helpful to the audience (students that have just been admitted to their first year of study) to give them information about all these programs in a single publication/site. They were able to see beyond their department walls and understand the big picture here. They were also able to set aside their previous efforts and let my department do what we’ve been trained to do. I am part of the Graphic Services department, which means that I work with professional graphic designers. When I first got the job I thought that this might be a bone of contention— I’ve heard lots of horror stories about how print people don’t understand the web and yadda yadda. But it has been quite the opposite. I have learned about print design and they have learned about the medium of the web, and we have worked well together, each bringing our own skills to the table. So the first thing we did was sit down with the clients as a department— web and print folks all together— and talk to the clients about the project. We talked about the goals of the client and the users, what kind of publications and web sites from our university these users have already interacted with, what questions they would have, and how we could make the process of sigining up to a bunch of separate programs as easy as possible. We went over the ways they have handled this information in the past and talked to them about what worked and what didn’t. Then we started brainstorming about the form the campaign could take, both in print and on the web. How can we get the main message across in an interesting way? How can we make signups easy? How can we make a complicated set of programs understandable to the students? How can we spark their interest to want to learn more? And how can we do it all with the limitations we have in terms of time and budget? Ask questions like this to a room full of creatives, and the energy and ideas will flow. We came up with a print poster that contained basic information, great photos, and a clear call to action for students to go to the web site to learn more and sign up. We really focused on the writing of the poster, borrowing a young creative guy from PR to help us. That step was a major boon to the project— we finally had words that fit with the designs we were doing, words written by someone who understands marketing and young people rather that by the director of the program or one of the employees that processes the registrations. We also removed as many of the acronyms of the programs as possible. There are so many that I can’t even keep them straight, let alone a student that hasn’t even been to campus yet. For the web site, I took design concepts from the printed piece and adapted them to the new medium. I focused on user interaction— how a student would move through the site, and how to orgainize the large amount of information that is there. Since the print piece was a poster rather than a booklet, the bulk of the information went on the web, including course descriptions, fees, testamonials, and signup forms. So the architecture of the site became essential. We then spent a lot of time working out an interactive signup form, that allows folks to sign up for the various programs in one place. The form sends the essential information to the various separate departments involved, while being transparent to the student. I can’t stress this enough. Students don’t care who is in charge of what on campus. They just want to do what they need to do and move on. This was a major goal of ours, which we largely met. The project has been a success so far, and it is one that everyone involved is proud of, which is some feat. There is some refining to be done for next year, but when is the first iteration ever perfect? Goals have been met so far— signups are way ahead of where they were last year and almost all feedback is good. It’s nice to feel victorious. Too often university projects are ruined by politics, budget, and territoriality.

Bite Size Goodness

One of the projects I have been working long and hard on launched today: Introducing Bite Size Standards. The braindchild of John Oxton, Bite Size Standards aims to offer concise web development tutorials, tips and tricks. I was in charge of the Textpattern inplementation, and had the pleasure of working with an awesome international team, including Prabhath Sirisena, James Akaxaka, Ann McMeekin, and Andrew Disley. It was a great experience to work with such a diverse and talented team. Many a debate was had along the way (Ann and James are master debaters, hee hee), and that was half the fun. My first contribution is Take time to tune your titles. Hopefully this will be the first of many. This was also not your average Textpattern install, and I’m sure there will be an article or two about it showing up here about that, as well. I hope you enjoy the site, and take away some helpful web standards nuggets.

Where was I?

Prabhath hit me with a meme.

One Year Ago

I’m All Web 2.0 Now

I just implemented a kick ass plugin that allows me to tag my articles and create on of those trendy tag clouds. All joking aside, I have come to like tags much better than categories for organizing my thoughts. Plus I always kind of hated the way the category listing looked— the tag cloud looks much better over there on the home page. The danger becomes generating just too many tags for my own good, but we’ll see how it goes. There may be some style/layout glitches while I fool around with the tags, so please be patient.

Real-World University Web Design: Get to the Root of the Problem

I thought I’d document the process that I have been using lately on my university web designs, since after about 2.5 years of refining I have come up with one that actually seems to work well for me and my clients. This is shaping up to be another series; in this part I’ll talk about starting at the beginning. A key part of the beginning of the design process is having access to a group of talented, creative people who have expertise in an area different from your own. They could be writers, graphic designers, programmers, system admins, art students, etc. I would try to stay away from faculty members (did I just say that?!) unless they are unjaded and not pressed for time. The two key qualities of the group members is creativity and expertise in some area. If you work as a team of one like I do, you may have to get creative in getting access to these folks, but it will probably be worth it. Chances are that some exist within your parent department, and others exist in those departments you have to work with all the time (IT if you reside in PR, and vice versa). The process starts like this: First, define the actual problem you are trying to solve. Try to remove all technology and design from this definition. For example, “we need an interactive way for folks to look up campus buildings and their locations” is better than “we need to use the Google Maps API to provide campus maps” and also better than “we need to update our online maps because they are outdated and ugly”. If you do “client” work for academic or administrative departments, you will need to guide them during meetings to get them to tell you what it is they really want to accomplish. Why do they want to redesign their site? What do they want to get across to their users? What is the most important message they want to convey? This may sound strange to folks in the for-profit world, but university clients often come to me for web work without a clear vision of what they are trying to do, much less why they need to do it. Once you get the problem boiled down, start talking about it with the aforementioned creative folks. They will start brainstorming ideas— “wouldn’t it be cool if“s— and will likely bring up points that you hadn’t thought of. Write things down, even if you don’t think they’re technically possible. Folks may come up with resources, other sites they have seen that they like, a cool thing their friend is doing, etc. Often, from these conversations, I learn that the problem is not what the client thought it was, and what’s more, it’s not what I thought it was, either. The day I realized this was a real eureka moment for me. How can you make an effective site if you’re solving the wrong problem? Once you figure out the problem you can start working on the best technology to tackle it, and then you can start working on your standards-compliant accessible code. And then you can usability test it and blah blah blah. The point here is not to get caught up in your own little corner of expertise before you get the big picture nailed down. I have spent a lot of time going back and fixing sites— sites I built— that are ineffective simply because they’re trying to do the wrong thing. Many times this is because I didn’t talk to anyone else about what I was doing, and many times it is because I took the client’s request at face value and did just what they asked for. This first step— defining the problem— is much harder than it sounds. And, even though it doesn’t call your coding or CSS skillz into play, it is probably the most important part of the whole process. How do the rest of you get to the root of the problem? Any tips or techniques to share?

How to Stop a Conversation:

Mention that you have depression. One of the reasons I still can’t put into words my feelings about SXSW this year is that the project I’m most excited about at the moment had the effect of causing folks to run away from me as soon as possible after hearing about it. This is not good for networking. I guess I should not have been surprised by the reaction, but I was. Partially because I’m sure that at least half of the folks that reacted that way also have depression. Partially because since I have found that talking about it is much more healthy than denying it, I assume that everyone else is on the same page. They aren’t. That fact is the reason why I think Jangly Ganglia as a community project, rather that as just my own means of coping, is important. Mental health issues need to overcome the stigma attached to them, and the only way that is going to happen is if we all stop denying them. I am no activist. I have tried to be an activist for a couple of different issues in the past, and it just doesn’t work for me. But I see an opportunity for a kind of “stealth” activism here— we can use the crazy-easy publishing power of blogs and the community potential of the web for our own benefit— to help us focus on the postive in life— and just by the fact that the site is there be helping to reduce the stigma that we all face. The great thing about this is that it allows each particular person to be anonymous if they so choose, which may crucially important factor in the decision to talk about depression. But even being anonymous, you would be part of a community that is furthering understanding of your issues. And I find the project easy to do; I have been spending about 5 minutes a day on posts. That is a small chunk of time, and it has has a had huge payoff for me. Anyway, I am excited about this project and wanted to tell everyone I met at SXSW about it. I didn’t really accomplish what I set out to do there, hence this post. I have recently won a license and hosting package that will allow me to get this project off the ground and keep it non-profit and expense-free for me. If you are interested in joining the project, please see this post over at Jangly and get in touch.