Copyright Arto Teräs

When designing a new website or redesigning an existing one, many decisions are made about content, structure, functionality, etc.  Not all of the decisions are made for the right reason. These choices will impact, either positively or negatively, the experience a visitor has to your website.

Most of the decisions made will be based on user experience or easiness.  That is, either it will take more time to execute and result in a positive user experience or it will be easier to execute and will have a poorer user experience.  Sometimes, you can have both.

My experience is that people tend to gravitate to the easier approach.  This is likely because of lack of focus or understanding on user experience.

Some statements that lead to the easier approach rather than one focused on the user experience are:

• We’ve always done it this way.
• We don’t have the time or resources.
• It would be too hard.
• Management wants it done like this.
• We don’t know how to do it.

All of these excuses focus on the organization and not the website visitor.  It is absolutely critical that there be a paradigm shift in organizations to focus on the needs and understanding of the end user.  Failure to do this will result in a sub-par product that fails to deliver.

Take for example the web redesign project I am working on at work.  Our current website uses the open source CMS, Joomla.  The easy solution would be to continue to adopt Joomla in the redesign process because it’s familiar.  Rather than taking this approach and focusing on the organization’s needs, we are opting to develop on Drupal.  Among many benefits, Drupal will provide a more intuitive experience for our website visitors.

When you’re involved in any web design project, always be aware of the possible statements that can distract you from the user experience.  I leave you with some great advice I’ve head many times before, ‘put on your external visitor lenses.’

I would like to extend that thought to more than blogs.  We can all agree that participating in social media is important for various reasons.  Many of us, myself included, have gone off and created institutional accounts in a multitude of social networks.  Your intentions were good. You wanted to engage and interact with potential students.  But your social network is stale!

Anyone who is involved with social media will tell you that it is not hard, but takes a commitment of time and effort. What do you do if you’ve already created your institution’s social network account, but don’t have the time to invest in it?  I’ve looked at a handful of Facebook groups that have been setup on behalf of programs at higher education institutions.  Half of them have had minimal activity and the last wall post was a month or more older.  This will hurt your brand!

Whatever platform you are using, keep it fresh!  A lack of activity in your social networks will cause the following to happen:

• Visitors will stop visiting, thus negating the effectiveness of the social network.
• A negative perception of your institution will develop because of a lack of commitment.

How do you keep it fresh?  That is the $64,000 question.  Here are few tips to help:

• Put in your calendar daily reminders to invest 10 minutes a day in your social networks.
• Hire student ambassadors to represent your institution and interact with potential students.
• Recruit existing members of your social networks to participate as moderators or admins.
• Link you social networks together (eg. Twitter updates can appear in Facebook).

What other tips can you offer for helping keep social networks fresh?  Please share.

Social media has empowered people to connect with people  in ways never thought before.  It has also increased each person’s global reach and influence.  That being said, it has also increased risks.  I’m not saying to commit social media suicide, just know your risks and be smart.

Here is a great video that demonstrates the risks.

Find more videos like this on Classroom 2.0

Image from Flickr via Untitled blue

Many higher education institutions have multiple target audiences and multiple goals they want to accomplish.  This is usually represented by the institutional website.  You may see messaging for alumni, parents, donors, government, faculty, prospective students, current students, partners, etc.  With each of these audiences, there are usually tasks the institution would like to see these visitors accomplish.

There is great risk in attempting to address all our audiences equally on your public website.  A  consultant we have been working with really summed it up with this quote:

Where many are served, few are served well.

Having your public website provide information and tasks for too many audiences cause your visitors to weed through irrelevant content which causes confusion and a lack of interest.  Taking a Focused Design approach will help you achieve your goals online. I’m going to share some of the tips that I’ve observed so far in our redesign project.

Work an External Consultant

I realize that working with external consultants come with their fair share of difficulties.  But there is one benefit that trumps all the difficulties – they are an outside resource.  As you being your journey, there will be many internal stakeholders that will have their opinions about how the site should work, who the audience is and what the goals are.  Bringing in outside voice into the mix remove some of your internal subjectivity.

Identify Primary Goals

A large reason why websites focus on many audiences is because they don’t have a primary goal identified for their website.  Organizations that have not formally agreed on primary goals for the website are not guided and are subject to wavering and constant circling with regards to their messaging online.  Identifying your primary goal, with the help of an outside voice, will help to narrow down the target audience(s), messages, tasks, etc.

Identify Primary Target Audience

Once you have identified your primary goal, it becomes much simpler to identify who your audience(s) is.  Identifying your primary audience will help in crafting messages, which content is important, tasks etc.  Your messages should speak to your audience(s).  It should motivate them to take action.  Anything short of that is a waste of time and will clutter your website.

Stick to Your Guns

This will be far the most difficult.  You can have campus-wide agreement on goals and audiences, but sticking to your guns after-the-fact will be challenging.  It is absolutely critical that you do though.  When new content is suggested for your website, always go back to the goals and audience(s).  Does the new content speak to primary target audience? Does it support the primary goal of the website?  If not, then it needs to find another home.  Failure to do this will cause your website to become cluttered very quickly.

There is more to it than these four suggestions.  The Focused Design is really about a new way of thinking.  It’s not about being everything to everyone online, but identify your primary audience and being everything to them.

Image via clipartheaven.com

We’ve all heard of laws that are crazy or outdated. These laws were created at time when they were needed and in fact valid.  But times change, but in many cases the laws don’t.

Did you know that:

• In France it is illegal to call a pig Napoleon.
• In Ohio, it is against state law to get a fish drunk.
• In London, it is illegal to flag down a taxi if you have the plague.

Now these laws, as strange as they may sound, probably served a purpose at one time. The same goes with various laws that affect us digitally on the web.  These include copyright laws, intellectual property, privacy laws, access laws (eg. China censoring Google, or USA prohibiting viewing of web content from outside the USA), etc.  At one time, these laws had a purpose in their current form.  But just as the laws mentioned above need revising, so do the laws affecting Internet usage and content.

Copyright & Intellectual Property Laws

I don’t want to come across that as a person that thinks we should all have the write to reuse and take whatever we want.  I only am saying that copyright laws should evolve to match the technology. I really support the Creative Commons project and license model.  It really is about making it easier and legal for people to share and build on each other’s work.  In an instance a youth can make a mashup of their clips and music and publish it to YouTube or other social networks and with today’s copyright laws, they committing crimes.  Michael Wesch is a professor at Kansas State University and he has a great video about the Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.  Below is a snippet talking about the impact current copyright laws have.

Privacy & Access Laws

It may seem weird to have these two topics together, but when I refer to privacy laws, I’m mainly referring to the point that Canadian public institutions cannot have personal information stored on servers outside Canada.  This will prove to be more and more difficult as we see the web innovations continually coming from US based companies such as Google and Facebook.  I don’t know about you, but being blocked from viewing web-based content from US networks is starting to get old.  This law, similar to the copyright law, is making criminal out of otherwise law abiding citizens.  Many download shows that they are not able to view online.

I was having a conversation with a colleague and he mentioned a thought that was very profound but simple.  The Internet has no country.  And yet countries try to enforce national laws on a system that is global. I find it very interesting that in many ways, the Internet has brought the globe closer, but laws continually attempt to keep us far apart.

I would compare the Internet to the early Gutenberg Printing Press.  All of a sudden, books were starting to find their way into the hands of commoners.  This did cause concern for the medieval church.  I’m sure there were some that would like to have seen the printing press fail, but ultimately literacy came to more people.  Just as we are seeing laws attempting to limit access, control content flow and criminalize remixing, we see these laws change.