From four initial designs, the Web Advisory Committee chose two designs to present to the campus community on this blog and in other ways. People expressed their preferences, and their comments led to improvements in the design that went into production.  Those of you  who commented were among the nearly 1,800 people who, through this blog, e-mail, usability testing or group discussions, helped shape the site and its content.

Some of the new features  include:

• More consistency in navigation
• Background photos that create a sense of place;
• Spotlight stories that change frequently;
• Meet a Tar Heel profiles that reveal the people behind the work;
• An interactive campus tour;
• A revamped events calendar with an improved interface for both publishers and visitors;
• A Flickr stream for people to submit photos to be published on unc.edu; and
• A text sizer.

University Relations worked with Raleigh communications and marketing firm Capstrat to develop the redesign concepts and conduct user testing, and partnered with ITS to build and launch the site. An committee of faculty, staff and students offered their advise along the way.

The redesign team appreciates everyone’s part in making the new site a reality.  Thank you!

The first session was a brief overview of the redesign process with information about the design system, CarolinaContent content management system, the online style guide and more.  You can find my presentation here. Double-click on each slide’s sound icon to hear the presentation.

Jeremy Davis of ITS Web Services led the next two sessions, sharing information about the CarolinaContent platform and the federated design system.   A pdf of his slides are here.

With about seventy people attending, there were many questions.  You can see the questions and answers here.

Thanks!

Scott

We’ll discuss:

•     1 p.m. consistency of design and navigation

•     2 p.m. content management system CarolinaContent

•     3 p.m. improvements in the campus events calendar, standards, and more.

All on campus are welcome to attend.  If you have any questions beforehand, please feel free to post them here as a comment.  If you can’t make it, presentations will be online after the event as soon as possible, and we’ll update them with conversation from the sessions.

Hope to see you there.

Thanks again to all who shared in the redesign process.  The creative team took to heart all of your comments and those we heard outside of the blog and recent online poll.  Reaction to the two proposed designs fell into some main themes:  need for school colors, less darkness, larger school logo, more prominence for the utility navigation, and need for information about the background photo.

We addressed those concerns by

• adding more white and a bit more Carolina blue in places such as link text
• increasing the UNC  brand logo size by 25 percent
• emphasizing the utility navigation at top so that you can find the most-used tools of search, maps, directories and libraries
• adding descriptions of the changing background photos at a link in the top right corner.

Plus, we’ll create landing pages for campus athletics and health care.  The athletics page will provide information about Carolina’s recreational sports, fitness opportunities and varsity athletics.  The health care page will point users to the wealth of health and wellness resources on campus.

These changes improve a design that benefited from thousands of comments, user research, usability testing, and what we learned from best practices.  And, of course, the expertise of web developers and communications professionals on campus, as well as those directly involved in creating the design.

Plus, Chancellor Thorp made some helpful comments, too.

We’ll soon conduct another round of usability testing with an emphasis on accessibility that was not possible during the wireframe testing.  The creative team will work with ITS Web Services on building the new site in the content management system Carolina Content.

Proposed redesign for www.unc.edu. Click for a larger image.

The comments have been informative and encouraging.  Can everyone be pleased?  No, but we’re determined to strike the right balance.

Before we touch on main themes, please know that the design is evolving, based in large measure on your comments.  The themes that emerged from comments included:

Color:   Some of you like a dark background  and some don’t.  As far as how background color impacts readability, Web standards show that high contrast is of utmost importance.  We will continue to test and evaluate this.

Branding:  Some of you mentioned highlighting Carolina Blue and making the University’s logo bigger and more prominent.  We hear you.

Libraries:  Placing the Libraries link at the top of the page enables users to quickly access the site from every page in the same way as Directories and Maps.  Usability testing showed that people had no problem finding this link. Nevertheless, we’re working to make this more prominent.

Looks like something you’ve seen before: Successful sites have many elements in common.  Neither design was pulled off a template rack or copied.  Heck, I think the basis for design B is a Mondrian painting or a Mackintosh detail, so that’s high praise in my book.

Sense of place:  Some folks think that the large photo in design A gives a sense of place, especially if other photos of Carolina rotate through.  This has always been a priority.

Academic life:  With the addition of real content – photos and stories about the people exploring, creating and researching – the site will take users deep into Carolina’s meaningful academic life.  The design will serve as a starting point for this and the content will ultimately show the substance and heart of Carolina.

Photos:  Will images change?  Yes. The idea is to frequently interchange photos of our beautiful campus, academic settings such as laboratories and classrooms, and our people to show what life at Carolina is like.  Keeping the best user experience in mind, many photos will take users to the stories and people behind them. And, by the way, the photo stream will be moderated.

Thanks again for your feedback.  We’ll continue to use the blog to keep you up-to-date on our progress and we welcome your comments at any point.

On behalf of the Web Advisory Committee,  Scott.

Here are our goals for the new site design:

• a site that not only meets users’ needs, but illustrates the academic exploration, life-changing research, and important work of our faculty, students and staff.
• a user-friendly site. That means a new design that helps you find what you’re looking for – quickly and easily. It also means more relevant content, including RSS feeds, campus updates, a mobile version of the site, a Libraries link at the top of the page, and plenty of new features.
• a distinctly Carolina site. We don’t want to look like every other University Web site out there. We want to go in a direction that shows why Carolina is distinctive.

A couple of notes on both designs.

1. Navigation: Users have multiple entry points, based either on user group or by content category.
2. You will see the places for:
   • A big story (breaking news or an in-depth look at a subject)
   • Campus updates, such as Commencement information, with longer shelf lives
   • User-submitted photos
   • News and calendar feeds
   • Social media

Enough said. Here are the designs.

Click on the image to zoom in.

Click on the image to zoom in.

* More than 1,000 people shared feedback on the interim home page design in 2008.

* We interviewed nearly 50 campus stakeholders and students last September and October.

* 1,600 of you completed an online user survey.

* We held a series of student focus groups.

* In February 2009 more than 1,000 of you helped test the proposed navigation.

* Just last month, we sat down with 17 people representing a cross section of users to conduct an in-depth usability test for the new navigation and proposed features.

* Throughout the process, we’ve presented our findings to campus stakeholders and to  students from schools and units from across campus, ranging from ITS to Undergraduate  Admissions to the Graduate School to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication to UNC Health Care.

* Nearly 100 comments on this blog and others through help.unc.edu have provided valuable suggestions.

What did we learn? Clearly, UNC.edu has a diverse set of users. It’s both the entry point  for insiders and the proxy to the outside world. Based on what you told us, the new site  needs to:

* Improve ease-of-use so you can find what you need, quickly and easily

* Increase relevance by providing timely and interesting content

* Help users navigate the University’s complex environment

* Reflect Carolina’s personality: preeminence without pretension

* Impart a sense of our culture

* Convey a distinctive look and feel.

We’re not done yet, in a couple of weeks you’ll get a preview of the  designs and will have the opportunity to share your feedback and preferences. Once a  final direction is chosen, we’ll conduct additional testing with users across campus,  including accessibility testing.

Thank you for your feedback. We look forward to  hearing from you again.

Scott Jared, University Relations, on behalf of the design team and advisory committee

By incorporating accessibility standards into our new site we’ll not only help those with physical disabilities, but also benefit users on different platforms, browsers, and mobile devices. In addition, an accessible web site can improve search engine rankings.

Although many factors contribute to an accessible web site, WebAIM recommends the following high-level guidelines:

* Provide text alternatives for any non-text content
* Provide alternatives for time-based media such as audio or video
* Create content that can be presented in different ways without losing information or structure
* Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background
* Make all functionality available from a keyboard
* Provide users enough time to read and use content
* Provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are
* Make text content readable and understandable
* Make Web pages appear and operate in predictable ways
* Help users avoid and correct mistakes
* Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents (such as browsers, screen readers, braille browsers, mobile phones), including assistive technologies.

Let’s embrace new technologies and create a rich, interactive experience while also ensuring that our site is accessible to the entire Tar Heel community.

by Billy Hylton, ITS Web Services, Senior Web Producer & ad hoc member of UNC Web Advisory Committee

Those of us who study human-computer interaction or engage in website design have moved beyond basic usability – usability means that someone can effectively and efficiently accomplish their goals when using our site. In addition to being usable, a site should evoke an emotional response in the user. Those emotional responses may vary over a wide range, depending on the goals of the site. For example, an environmental activist site might want to motivate people to take action, while a multi-user game site might want to evoke the experience of having fun. A medical information site might want its users to engage seriously with the information they provide, while a high-end department store site might want its users to feel like they’re in the lap of luxury.

Designing to evoke a particular emotional response is still more of an art than a science, but the tools used to design usable sites can also inform design decisions related to the user experience. A wide variety of user research supports the redesign of unc.edu. In particular, a survey completed by 376 prospective students, 70 first year students, 345 upperclass students, 103 graduate students, 117 faculty members, 379 staff, 334 parents and 320 alumni yielded much useful data and ideas.

From the user data, the development team concluded that one of the ways that a new design of the UNC website can promote a positive user experience is by balancing the site’s functionality with its ability to tell a story.  This could be done through three narratives that are important to UNC:

• sense of place: Carolina’s openness, atmosphere, beauty.
• vitality – that people (both students and faculty) come here to engage in exciting work on interesting problems.
• heritage, with an emphasis on both its long tradition and how up-to-date it is today.

Through these three narrative emphases, a new website design will attempt to convey the institutional culture of UNC to those website users who are new to the site and to those who use it every day.

Barbara Wildemuth, member of the UNC.edu redesign steering committee and Professor in Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science

No. Let me rephrase that: hell no. If you’re an ideas junkie like me, research is where the action is — what’s up, what’s next, and what’s new. How do we let people in on the action?

On a Website, a new UNC.edu, that’s how. Let’s take a chance. When it comes to the wild, woolly, wonderful Web, boring and safe are not options. They are dead on arrival. Let’s find the action.

Action, like the kind you find in a good tale about a daring adventure, a risky gamble, a passionate quest! Such stories are the soul of research. Let’s find them. Let’s find surprises. We live for surprises. Research is hatching a goodly supply. But most of all, most of all, we are craving enchantment. Give us some spellbinding, mind-bending mystery and breathtaking awe.

Dream on, you say. How in the world do we find all of that? With a telescope, a microscope. With a computer than conjures from data the long-hidden patterns of life. Where have all the wizards gone? They’re here. Right here.

Let’s stop boiling our research down into bullet lists and bragging points. Let’s write the stories about mysteries unfolding. Let’s find some brave daring-do. Let’s follow sea turtles finding their way home, take the pulse of an active volcano, read about climate in a glacier’s ice or a mollusk’s shell, wage war against cancer, wander the maze of a protein, unwind the magical ribbons of life.

Students? The best ones won’t come to Carolina to play it safe, to hold up a test tube and mug for the lens. They want a piece of the action. They want to take on a huge, hairy problem and solve it. They want to arrest global warming, invent a clean fuel, cure a disease, correct an injustice, name a new species, compose a great concerto. Let’s show them this is the place to be doing all that. Forget the propaganda, the impressive statistics. Let’s find the stories, the images, and the people right here on our campus who go about changing the world.

by Neil Caudle, member of the UNC.edu redesign steering committee and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. Neil oversees communications, external relations, information technology and various projects for the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development.