What You See is Not the Real Design

At some point, most people who view our prototype of the new site want to talk about its visual aspects. However, while the videos and screen shots on this blog show what looks to be a finished website, it's not. The prototype is meant to look and act as real as possible so we can communicate our ideas and concepts in the most true-to-life way possible. That means we have to give it a visual look of some sort. But while you view the work, don't assume the colors, layout, fonts or other visual aspects are final.

At this early stage, we want to focus our efforts and discussions on the underlying principles of the site such as why we should segregate information by audience type or why we should organizing academic information around degree programs instead of departments, schools, colleges, and divisions. Only after this work is finalized will we then move into design explorations.

How Would You Group All of DU's Degree Programs?

The heart of the new DU site for prospective students is finding the degree program of your choice. We accomplish this through our "find a degree by subject" tool.

The question then becomes what is the best way to group all of DU's academic programs from a subject point of view? Here's one way to do it. The information in parenthesis could be listed out in the chart as a helpful addition, but I add it mainly to show what I would place in some groups.

• Arts, Performing & Visual (art, design, music, theater)
• Business (all the Daniels programs, economics)
• Communications (MCOM, HCOM, journalism)
• Education
• Engineering & Computers
• Humanities (philosophy, religious studies, languages & literature)
• International Studies
• Law
• Natural Sciences & Math
• Political Science & Public Policy (maybe listed under social science
  below?)
• Social Sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology, social work, criminology)

One thing to consider is whether to place a program in more than two places if its curriculum blurs across the chosen topics. For example (and this might be a bad example but bear with me), marketing could be listed under both business and communications because of its association with advertising. I don't think there are a lot of programs that would be listed multiple times, but it should be a tactic we use if it helps students find a program.

Of course, we'll test our ideas, but we need a place to start and here it is. As always, please add your thoughts.

University of Denver Re-design: Find A Degree

Preview our concept of how to find a degree.

University of Denver Re-design: Audience Tour

Preview our concept behind segregated audiences.

The New Site In A Nutshell

At its most basic level, the new du.edu site will revolve around who visits the site. As you might imagine, every person who visits our site has a particular task or set of tasks they wish to accomplish. What this allows us to do is group the people with similar tasks into broad audience types.

For example, many site visitors want to earn a degree- psychology, law, marketing, etc. We can group these people together and call them "prospective students". Using the same logic, we come up with a handful of other audience types all categorized around a group's shared needs and wants. Other audiences could include current students, university employees, alumni and news media. These categories allow us to tailor the site to each audience's needs without the burden or baggage of wading through information that isn't relevant to them. Does a prospective student need to be presented with university employee work policies? No. This system allows us to sidestep this problem.

If we continue with our prospective student example group, we can subdivide them even further based on other tasks, needs and wishes. Through our research, we find that undergraduates want information on their degree program of choice and also a sense of what the university is like outside the classroom- the social scene, activities, housing, and the physical surroundings (both campus and the larger backdrop of Denver and the mountains). Graduate students also want extracurricular information, but their focus is more academically based (research opportunities, faculty, program requirements and rankings, alumni information, etc.).

You begin to see how the site can be organized around needs rather than, as is currently the case, how the university is organized. This approach personalizes the site's content around the visitor's goals. They no longer have to navigate their way through hierarchical levels of schools, colleges, divisions and departments which they don't understand as a non-DU member. Instead, the new site will drive visitors to their program of interest quickly and easily and, once there, surround them with information pertinent to that program instead of having to go to other sites for relevant information.

Video Discussions

Our group will present a series of videos to explain various aspects of the new website under development. Each video will tackle a single topic so that feedback and discussions can be focused within the comments area. Our first video will discuss how we handle different audience groups and why we separate them.

Each video will show a prototype of the site as it exists at that point in time. The design will likely change over time to reflect what we learn from testing our ideas and incorporating feedback from DU staff so listen to the concepts and ideas presented instead of concentrating on how something looks. We'll also have videos concerning design matters, but those videos will explicitly state that in the beginning.

Student Feedback on the New Site

The slideshow we've created provides an overview of the new site's core idea. In order to verify whether it will work, we enlisted the help of students. Through a series of focus groups and one-on-one tests of our prototype, we will confirm whether or not the idea will work.

We have already begun to elicit feedback from students and, on the whole, responses have been positive. Below are some quotes we've gotten:

• About finding a program of study: "That was pretty easy."
  
• About finding a program of study: "It wasn't difficult."
  
• "All the information I need ... is right on the front page."
  
• About a sample admissions page: "Admissions requirements checklist- that's perfect."
  
• After finding program of study information: "That's actually a good approach" and "Yeah, I feel this is a better approach."
  
• "I definitely like this layout a whole lot more than how it is right now."
  
• "I like it. It doesn't feel to busy, but there's all the information you need on it."