Designing a One-Size-Fits-All University Web Template, and other Impossible Behemoth Challenges

transcript

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Other Behemoth Challenges

Institutionalized

The similarities between prison life and university life are several...

credit: http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/2005/06/

Both places have tiny rebellions and mutinies, mostly insignificant, sometimes violent.

Most people are involved in sports.Every else reads.

Lots of free concerts.

Some say there’s also very bad pay, and/or squalid living conditions.

The most common parallel: one’s inability to leave after years of regimen.

Get to know the internal academic and administrative mechanics of a university while keeping your edge, staying productive, and remembering your duty to the

external audience...

Don’t Get Comfortable

Design Arrogance

We design things to work one way, and we’re unprepared for how people REALLY use them.

A desire path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and

destination.

Do not build what you cannon sustain

Oh, we could build a custom website for...

Websites, like campfires, require tending and maintenance. You can’t build 12 of them, walk

away, and expect anything but failure.

They’ll become useless and die without constant care.

Or they’ll rage out of control and burn you alive.

The negativity. What about the positives?

• cool things going on

• relative job security

• hey you’ve got a gym, and a library, at WORK!

Universities are great places to work.

Interesting People

Interesting Stories

Great place to escape corporate life and work for the public good.

Universities have trouble publishing and promoting their content in a unified, dignified manner, which leads us to...

Web Templates

Designing a One-Size-Fits-All University Web Template

Teamwork

Outliers

think about this

• Hundreds of crazy websites

• Who knows how many are coded correctly. SEO?

• Who knows how many are accessible?

• They don’t benefit from campus Google analytics.

• Etc..

The student experience

…Along they way they bounce through three additional department Web sites, but the prospective student feels like they’ve been to three completely different university sites.

Source: .eduGuru: Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive web presence

Each step along the way they have to figure out where the navigation and search bar have moved, how their content is organized, what lingo they use, and likely have a completely different experience on each site.

Source: .eduGuru: Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive web presence

From a Branding Perspective

Branding is about more than logos and colors.

User Experience IS the Brand.

Mass production of pages is a good thing because the audience wants the information, not each content contributor’s own personal vision of how it should look. We tried that model. It was called GeoCities and it didn’t work out that well.

source: http://www.contenthere.net/2009/07/you-bought-a-web-page-factory-not-a-webmaster-android.html

How to Proceed?

Where to Start?

Focus on enforcement?

Focus on building better templates.

Part of the problem is our current template offering...

Mistakes were made.

Collective Blame

Banner Area

800 px width is old school

Global navigation

Do this once, and do it right

• Design an attractive, sustainable system of layout/templates.

• Design them to expand and adapt.

• Don’t get sloppy. Pay attention to detail. Your work will be propagated and reproduced on hundreds and thousands of pages.

First, let’s get something straight.

Presentation is secondary.

In order of importance

1. Our web content. What we say How we say it How we organize what we say 2. How that content is presented.

In order of importance

Product vs Packaging

Presentation is secondary, but still very important.

Where to start?

Design standards, and centralized set of templates

Who are you?

Web people in large organizations come in two types:

Who are you?

Those who conjure up web branding and identity policies...

Who are you?

And those who live under them.

This I Believe

For every 1 site owner upset about restricted design freedom, there are 15 site owners who just want a solid foundation and framework to work within.

This I Have Noticed

I’ve been pilfering through dozens of university web branding guidelines lately. I’ll attempt to categorize them:

• Nazi Web Branding Guidelines

• The Helpful and Supportive Web Guidelines

• The Loose, Lax, Almost Anything is Acceptable, Web Branding Guidelines

Why is this IMPORTANT?

Besides branding? It's important because it allows people to spend their resources on CONTENT, not hiring designers, css gurus and developers.

They can spend money on content creation. Text, videos, photography, news, etc...

Don’t screw this up

• Be "more wider"

• Allow for a higher level of sub-branding/customization and design while maintaining consistent level of presentation.

• Require less graphic labor to setup/launch

• Room to grow; Allow pathways for future enhancements

Start with a grid.

Why the boxes? Show me something, Mr web designer.

Ye Old Box Model helps us to:

• Get a head start coding the structure of the site(s)

• Make important decisions about structure and formatting without caught up in conversations about finding the right font, color, or photo

• In the same way an author makes an outline before writing a book, this serves as my visual outline before creating a design.

What next?

Typography

http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period/

• Be "more wider"

• Require less graphic labor to setup/launch

• Room to grow; Allow for future enhancements

• We want something simple and elegant, in which layout and typography can stand on their own.

Don’t screw this up

http://ualr.edu/communications/assets/images/tierzoom/index.html

Cookie Cutter?

True Statement:

We don’t know for certain HOW people are viewing our site(s).

One of the Goals

Things that Templates won't "Fix"

Well crafted messaging

Information Architecture

With templates, content contributors have less responsibility for layout and branding of the site but they are responsible for the words and pictures and organization of the content.

The quality and craftsmanship of those aspects of the site needs to be recognized.

Before you hire a designer,

hire a writer.

That is everything I know.

Learn from my continued failure...

Drew Stephens

The E to the mail:wastephens@ualr.edu

Incoherent ramblings:collegewebguy.com

Shorter incoherent ramblings:twitter.com/collegewebguy

Steal some bookmarks:delicious.com/thisisdrew

View an awful design portfolio:thisisdrew.com/portfolio

I took a photo of myself. How pathetically egotistical.