The Goals This Time ‘Round

Back in 2004, during our first in-house homepage design process, the Web team developed a set of three goals that would drive the design. Those goals were: To provide more space on the homepage for content that changed; to create a more consistent navigational scheme that would allow visitors to find information more easily across all the University schools and divisions; and to conform and validate to a growing set of Web standards that were being increasingly adopted by modern Web browsers.

Those three goals proved to be a very useful device for the team in framing the process as it went along. Whenever we questioned ourselves about what we should do in the design or the structure of the site, we fell back on those three goals and asked: “Well, how or to what extent does that idea advance any one of our three goals?” Having that big picture in mind made it a lot easier to make the many little choices involved in a successful design.

So we figured, hey! Let’s do that again!

This time ’round there are five goals for the redesign (why stop at three?). They are:

  • Make a dramatic and immediate impact on users
  • Create simple, clean navigational elements
  • Emphasize prospective and current students as the primary audiences (on the homepage and on the supporting pages when appropriate)
  • Beef up the supporting pages; rely less on institutional “lists” and more on dynamic content and visitor participation
  • Use underlying technology that takes advantage of new user environments (eg. larger monitor sizes/resolutions, mobile devices)

–lori

One thought on “The Goals This Time ‘Round

  1. Excellent Goals!

    Please try to make the website more interactive and multimedia rich where students are highly compelled and interested in the website. Such as adding more links and making videos a high priority.

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