OVERVIEW
Process
Starting in January 2006, Sarah Horton, Rick Adams, and Martin Grant (the HomeTeam) embarked on the research phase for the 8th version of the Dartmouth home and top-level pages. The research phase was composed of several tasks:
- Define redesign goals
- Identify ongoing resources
- Learn about users
- Identify best practices
Methodology
Our research included meetings with senior administrators, including the Strategic Communications Committee and regular discussions with Sheila Culbert and Bill Walker; student, staff, and faculty focus groups; surveys of users and colleagues at peer institutions; review of existing literature; analysis of usage logs and search queries; and user testing involving current students, prospective students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Process details can be found in Appendix a.
Research results
The research phase yielded useful insights, some of which will become more relevant as we move forward with the design phase. In defining strategic directions, we focus here on the following four areas: audience, design, navigation, and content. Detailed results of our research are found in Appendices b–l.
Audience
Our greatest challenge is meeting the needs and fulfilling the expectations of a broad range of users. Based on the data on hand, we can see two primary audience groups: for the purposes of this discussion, we will label them “internal” and “external.” Internal users are primarily interested in accessing information and services to support their daily activities: web-based applications, library resources, dining menus, campus maps, Dartv. External visitors are seeking news, information about admissions, and information about the College. Many of our site visitors could be identified in either or both categories—or example, an alumnus/a and current or prospective parent could, simultaneously, be consider both internal and external.
While diverse, the needs of internal and external visitors are not mutually exclusive. We believe we can arrive at a single design that will meet the needs of all users by considering our Web site as an online extension of our campus. Prospective students are new to campus and need help getting around, and our task is to provide a guided tour. Alumni and the graduate schools have their own online facilities, and our job is to direct users to those facilities. All other audience groups collectively inhabit the online campus, and our task is to provide coherent content in a solid and logical structure with good signage and other wayfinding devices to help users get where they need to go.
Design
Most users we spoke to responded favorably to the prominent image on the current home page. In addition, most felt Dartmouth green should figure prominently in any home page design. Some users suggested enlivening the home page with more frequent image updates and prominent news, events, and highlights. We intend to add more currency to the home page design by including more news and events, and a random image feature.
Navigation
Many users complain of difficulty in locating information and services. The current navigation design, with categories, supporting keywords, and audience-based navigation, was generally found to be inadequate, as was the search engine. We intend to improve navigation by devising a more intuitive and comprehensive topic-based navigation system, removing the audience-based navigation, adding “quick links,” and improving searching.
Content
Many external users visit the Dartmouth site to access educational resources: e.g., the Milton Reading Room, Human Anatomy, and Chance. Most likely these sites are discovered through content-related searches and not via the home page, as there is no consolidated source of access to Dartmouth education resources. Indeed, users complained of difficulty locating a single source of information on events, dates, photos, departments, and so on. We intend to seek out opportunities to consolidate and proffer content, such as “Dartmouth in the World,” “Dartmouth Research,” and others.
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