Getting up-to-date

Right after the last post – end of June – we were joined by a consultant from Cignex for two weeks to guide us in the set up of our Plone content management system and train us in the programming required to make customizations to it. We had spent several hours on the phone going over our needs prior to her arrival and having her on-site for two weeks was great.

For the last month, we have been coordinating with I.T. (with great help from Mark Dunkerley), setting up test servers and programming our custom features. Meanwhile, editorial has been working on re-writing our content to be web friendly and the visual design team finished mockups.

Mockups

Our Web Manager, Gibran Soto, had the opportunity to present an update of the rebuilding plan and the mockups to President Ross and the deans. Now we are ready to share a glimpse of the future lynn.edu with you. These mockups are rough and not final. We will continue to make tweaks to the design as we build the new site.

Home page:

Section landing page:

Content page:

The Problem

When former Director of Web Strategy left the university, Matt and realized it would be very difficult for us to continue managing the change requests coming from across campus in the same way he had been doing. (He was handling all the little changes himself, freeing us to work on bigger projects.)

We would often get changes from different sources within the same department. Sometimes these changes would conflict or get reversed a week later.

There were also departments that were not sending us any updates. They thought we would already know when changes needed to be made.

This was resulting in inaccurate and outdated information across the site which could only confuse and frustrate prospective students, leading them away from Lynn University.

The Solution

We realized that we needed a better system and came up with the idea of Web Watchers. WWs are liaisons in each department – one person per department – responsible for checking over their content and communicating necessary changes to us.

So if you are not a WW but see something on the site that needs to be changed, let your WW know. If you don’t know who that is, ask around your department or email Darren (dshay@lynn.edu).

Content Audit/Inventory

We started out by making a list of everything on our current site. We thought we might work from that inventory to determine what we still do or do not need. However, it turned out to be more efficient to just focus on the needs of the users and create a new content inventory based on those needs.

Card Sorting

Once we had that list, we labeled index cards with every piece of content and performed a card sorting exercise while trying to imagine what groupings of content would make the most sense to our users. We also asked some recent Lynn graduates who work in our office to do the exercise as well, hoping their brains would be a little more in tune to the target audience.

Site Map

Combining the results from these card sorts led us to our prototype site map. It’s worth noting that at this point, all of the words used to label the content were our own and are subject to be changed by the writing team who is working on careword analysis.

“When you discover the carewords of your customers, you discover what makes them click.”
-Killer Web Content, Gerry McGovern

Here is the basic top-level plan for the new site (in no particular order). This means we believe that everything that is pertinent to the users we’ve identified falls into one of these 5 sections and they represent the main navigation that will appear throughout the site.

• Home Page
  • Academics
  • Life at Lynn
  • Getting Started
  • About Lynn
  • Career Preparation

Visual Design

We’ve also begun work on the visual design of the new site. Lynn’s graphic design team, normally responsible for printed matter, is busy creating the look and feel of the new site in collaboration with the web team. New layouts, type styles and colors will be created so the entire site has a consistent feel. When we are further along in the process, we will share these designs with you.

From the data gathered we were able to create  personas that outlined the user’s background, motivations (why), needs (what) and features (how). Each persona represented a site user from a different audience group. Our users include:

• Sarah Davidson – prospective day undergraduate
• Heloisa and Paulo Faldini – parents of a prospective international student
• Peter Walker – prospective evening undergraduate

A lost wallet lies on a Manhattan street, stuffed with cash. A white middle-income male New Yorker, between 30 and 44, picks it up. Will he look for the rightful owner, or pocket the cash? Who knows? But if George Costanza, the white middle-income male New Yorker between 30 and 44 from Seinfeld, picks it up, everyone knows exactly what he’ll do. He’ll almost certainly keep the money, yapping endless self-justification to his friends at the coffee shop to conceal his feelings of guilt (Persona-lizing a site).

Each visitor is unique from any other visitor to the site in:

• Who they are
• Computer experience
• Motivation for being on the site
• Thought process
• Browsing habits

It would be impossible to create a persona to identify every type of user. Instead it’s important to define user’s on their commonalities and create personas to cover a range of users that are unique, but share traits with other users.
The process of writing personas will help lead you from a vague understanding (or none at all) of your audience to a clear definition of your core user(s) and the tasks/goals they are looking to accomplish.

Before personas can be written, it’s important to first know your user…

RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH

Gathering research about the site’s users will provide the foundation  for the creation of the personas. The data that is gathered will be used as a reference point to support and justify what is written in the personas.

Some things to look for when researching users:

• Demographic information
  • Age
  • Education
  • Ethnicity
  • Family Status
  • Gender
• Computer experience
  • Frequency of use
  • Reason(s) for use
• Motivation
  • Reason(s) for being on the site
  • Task(s) they are trying to accomplish
• Background/Psyche
  • What things influence the ways in which they act and think

How to Gather Research?

• Contextual Interviews
• Individual Interviews
• Surveys (Online)
• Focus Groups
• Usability Testing
• Web Analytics/Statistics

Using a mixture of these research techniques will allow you to gather a solid source of data about who a site’s users are and how they interact with the Web site.

Here’s an interesting article focusing on the collection of research and what exactly to look for: Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design. The article also include a comprehensive and elaborate (more detailed than what is necessary for most people’s persona needs) toolkit.

Writing the Persona

There is no set-in-stone template for what a user persona should look like, so the final appearance will come down to preference of those involved. While presentation may vary, there are a few key elements that should be included in any persona:

• A name and picture
• Demographic information
• Position, title and responsibilities
• Goals and tasks
• Environmental information (physical, social, technological)
• Written synopsis
• A quote that sums up what matters most

All this will help to create a persona that anyone can instantly associate with representing that group of users.

A persona should fit on a single page

However, emphasis should not be placed on the amount of content, rather the readability and quality of the content. The following are some things to keep in mind:

• K.I.S.S. – Keep it simple stupid
• Clearly label sections
• Use lists
• State the facts
• Less is more

A persona is not meant to be a biography, so don’t treat it like one. Focus only on the most critical information that plays a role in how the user perceives and interacts with the Web site and you’ll be well on your way to a good persona that clearly defines your users and their tasks/goals.

Here are some examples:

• USDA – Policy Gatekeepers
• USDA – Press Media
• USDA – Senior Manager
• Usability.gov – Contract Administrator
• Usability.gov – Management Analyst
• Usability.gov – New Employee

What is a Persona?

Wikipedia describes personas as fictional representations of various types of users written as descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few personal details to bring the persona to life.

Personas are more than basic descriptions of users, they are carefully researched and crafted personalities created to focus the team’s  energy.

Why Create Personas?

The www.lynn.edu Web site provides services to our users – news and events, apply online, lists of majors, etc. – so it is important to provide the best user experience possible.

If users are dissatisfied, confused, unable to use (the list goes on…) the Web site, then they are not likely to invest in the product (an education at Lynn). As an example would you be more likely to return to a restaurant that provided good service or bad service?

Thus, in order to provide users with the best possible experience, it’s necessary to focus on what will allow the user to accomplish their goals and satisfy their needs on the site.

Benefits

Usability.gov lists some of the benefits of writing personas:

• Users’ goals and needs become a common point of focus for the team.
• The team can concentrate on designing for a manageable set of personas knowing that they represent the needs of many users.
• By always asking, “Would Jim use this?” the team can avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use.
• Design efforts can be prioritized based on the personas.
• Disagreements over design decisions can be sorted out by referring back to the personas.
• Designs can be constantly evaluated against the personas, getting better designs into usability testing.

By helping us to see things from a user’s point of view, personas allow the team to not only understand the user, but create a better overall user experience.

View the survey | View the results

About the survey

• Online survey conducted over a two week period.
• Sent to 23 primary respondents (Cabinet members, Deans and Directors) with instructions to forward to others in their department.
• Received 95 total responses from 27 departments.

What we learned

Some of the survey results regarding www.lynn.edu include:

• Purpose: Provide an overview of the Lynn experience to recruit students.
• Top external audiences: Prospective students, prospective students’ parents and general public.
• The Web site should: allow users to quickly and easily do what they need to do, but the content should be compelling enough to cause a user to take action.
• Top tasks: Find current degree/course information, apply online and find contact information.

Upon examining the survey results, we learned that www.lynn.edu is an informative and professional looking Web site that is confusing, cluttered and inaccurate. Most of the issues mentioned in the survey can be grouped into three areas of concern: navigation, content and process.

www.lynn.edu is an informative and professional looking Web site that is confusing, cluttered and inaccurate

Navigation

While we were already aware of this and planning/working on improvements, the survey responses strongly enforced the fact that the navigation and search stink!

More often than not the changing navigation menus only help to get a user lost on www.lynn.edu and if they try to search it is quite likely the results that are returned are not anything that they were looking for.

Currently www.lynn.edu only succeeds in frustrating the user and making it difficult for them to find the content they are seeking.

Content

Again the survey supported another issue that we were aware of: there is too much content on www.lynn.edu.

The information overload creates issues of content being inaccurate and/or outdated. Even with all the excess content, sometimes it is missing altogether. The fact is that currently it just is not possible to keep on top of the overwhelming amount of content on www.lynn.edu.

Process

Many respondents to the survey voiced concerns about the current process of updating/getting content onto www.lynn.edu. Frankly, the current process is not very good and one of the biggest causes of misinformation on the Web site.

Some problems with the current process:

• Difficult for content contributers to keep content updated.
• All updates to www.lynn.edu must be submitted off-line in a Word document or print-out.
• Time consuming: Web team members repeat the work of content contributers when posting updates.
• Lost-in-translation: because all updates must go through Marketing, it’s at times assumed that we know everything and where everything needs to be updated.

Moving forward

As we continue moving forward with the rebuilding of www.lynn.edu, we’ll use the results of the survey as one of many references to data and recommendations for improvement. The survey results will help us create user personas and define tasks/key features for the Web site based on the audience, as well as launch a new initiative to help improve the process (Web Watchers).

“If you want a great site, you’ve got to test.”
-Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug

Why test?

Though we all may have had some ideas about what we thought was wrong with the site, none of us are capable of thinking like today’s teenagers, as much as we might like to believe we are.

Last August, the web team collaborated with usability testing firm User Insight, in Atlanta, Ga., to assess the state of our current site in preparation for the rebuilding process. We wanted to understand how high school students use our site and uncover the obstacles they encounter as they try to complete tasks such as finding tuition costs or information about a given degree program.

How did we do it?

Five high school students were selected and each was asked to complete a set of tasks on our site as well as the sites of two competing universities while we watched from another room. Each session lasted about 90 minutes and User Insight has an excellent facility where we were able to watch the user’s screen as they worked as well as their body language via camera. They were asked to talk out loud as they worked so we could see if they were happy or frustrated with each click.

Only five?

You might be wondering about the reliability of a test that only uses five respondents. The truth is, the first three respondents will uncover most of the major problems you have and the other two are there for good measure and some variance. It is better to take that information, fix the problems, and do another round of testing than it is to test with a lot of people at once. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has written about this on his site as has Steve Krug in his usability bible, Don’t Make Me Think.

Example

So that you can see how this works, here is an excerpt of Respondent 3. She was asked to find out how much it costs to go to each school. (2:39m) (Her image has been obscured for this public venue. Please contact us if you are interested in watching more of the testing, we have all five sessions on DVD as well as time logged transcripts.)

After each user session, we would have a breakout session with the User Insight team to go over the log and begin to organize the feedback of each user, finding common issues and comments between them. The next day User Insight had prepared a preliminary findings report which they went over with us and a few weeks later we had a final report with recommendations.

What did we learn?

We were quite surprised as we watched the students totally miss links we thought were plainly obvious because they didn’t see them or didn’t know what they meant. (i.e. Many high schoolers don’t know the meaning of the terms “undergraduate” and “graduate” or other higher ed language.)

Top findings:

• Usability issue: Nomenclature of major headings and subheadings should be re-examined. Many high school students do not know the “language of academia.”
• Branding Issue: Communicate your school’s reputation, core values, and mission through pictures and text on your homepage.
• Readability Issue: Make the website user friendly by reducing the amount of text; using bullets and bolding for easy scanning.
• Functionality Issue: Link details of degree programs to related topics.
• User Request: Include more pictures and reviews from current students to give future students a “feel” of what it will be like to live at Lynn for 4 years (emotional content, to balance the academic content of the rest of the site).

You can see all the details are in User Insight’s Final Report [PDF].

We are gathering input for these goals from several sources, including:

• Lynn 2020 Strategic Plan
• Usability testing of the current site by high school students
• An online user survey
• A survey of Lynn management and staff
• Team goals of the Marketing and Communication department
• Outside research reports with national data, such as:
  • Building an E-Recruitment Network: Connecting With College-Bound Seniors in the Era of MySpace (Noel-Levitz)
  • Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview (Pew Internet and American Life Project)
  • Online Video (Pew Internet and American Life Project)

We are also creating user personas and scenarios – more about those in an upcoming series of posts – to help us get to know our site’s visitors and understand their needs.

• Rebuilding is the best way to describe what we have set out to do. We are not simply changing the look of the site. Nor are we solely moving information around. We are laying a new foundation, erecting a new structure and creating a new appearance.
• We are talking about the public-facing web site, not MyLynn, which is why the www was noted in the address above. MyLynn has different users with different needs.

A blueprint has been created by the web team for the rebuilding project:

1. Goals: Deciding what we want to accomplish.
   • Users: Figuring out who uses the web site and what they need.
2. Content: Making a list of what we have. Deciding what we need and what we can remove.
   • Organization: Organizing the information for our users.
   • Visual Design: Creating the image we want to convey with color, fonts, photography.
3. Construction: Rolling up our sleeves and getting it done.
4. Launch: Grand opening.
5. Beyond: Processing feedback, ongoing maintenance and planning improvements.

Some parts of this plan have been underway since summer 2007. In future posts we will go into further detail about each step, bring you up to speed on what has already happened and update you as we move forward.

We welcome you to comment with your thoughts and ideas as we proceed.