Leadership « [pre]design

Leadership

Trickle-down website redesign doesn’t work

dripping paint

By now you have probably seen the xkcd cartoon mocking university websites. It highlights the differences between what users want and what the leaders of these organizations provide them. Inside Higher Ed published an article about the cartoon last week that ruffled lots of feathers and caught the attention of some of the very administrators and faculty responsible for the mess on these websites (yes, believe it or not, this is a leadership problem!) Like the 65 people who had commented on the article when I last checked, I too have lots of opinions on the topic.

But that’s not the point of this post.

This morning, Inside Higher Ed published a follow-up article on the subject, “Web Re(design)”. While they made some great points about the need for institutions to do their own research and understand their unique audience needs (they should have called the article [pre]design!), the debates among the “experts” about how to structure the home page left me with one thought…

ENOUGH ABOUT THE HOME PAGE ALREADY!

I’m not saying that navigation is not important. On the contrary, evidence shows that the find-ability and quality of content are the most important things on a college website to all audiences. I have years of primary research with thousands of high school students, parents, college students, faculty, staff and alumni that has always consistently pointed to this. I recently wrote about the need for usable and useful websites, which is borne out of my experience with this research. And if you don’t believe me, Noel-Levitz released a study last month that found the same thing.

But fixing the navigation and content on the home page doesn’t fix the problem. The home page is not a destination, it’s a starting point (and with search, you can’t even guarantee visitors start there to begin with). Perfecting the search engine and top-level architecture helps get users to their destination with greater ease, but what happens when they get there? Has the same level of attention been given to offices and departments at the college as to the home page and the slick top-level marketing veneer?

If you think college home pages are bad, you’ll really enjoy their department sites

For years, colleges and universities have been practicing what I call “trickle-down redesign”. They think that by redesigning the first couple of layers of the site and providing prettier templates and CMS tools to their departments, everything will get better. I can’t point to many examples where this has worked. Actually, I can’t point to any… because the problems with their department sites are more than skin deep.

I understand why they do this. Higher ed websites are decentralized behemoths. Not many schools have the time or resources to overhaul everything and they can’t afford to pay a consultant to do it all either. So they pay for the home page—give it all they got and hope for the best.

At the risk of sounding self-serving, I’m here to say the cost of trickle-down redesign is high. You can’t afford to trust that “owners” of mission-critical websites at your institution will take your tools and get it right all by themselves.

You may be thinking to yourself, “we don’t let that happen on mission-critical pages of our site.” Well, think again!

The destination

We know from research that the most important content to the largest, most important external audiences on a college or university website is information about academics and majors. This is followed by cost and financial aid information. And for competitive, tuition-driven private institutions with sticker prices near $50,000 a year, this information becomes even more important. Yet the entire website redesign budget is spent on the homepage and its accompanying bells and whistles.

I’m arguing that for these institutions, THE DESTINATION for many of your most important visitors is the academic department site or the financial aid section of the site (a.k.a. the financial aid office’s website). I challenge you to pick a college, any college, and go to these sections. Most of the time you’re going to find hard to use, out of date, amateur looking sites that sound like they were written by financial aid administrators and faculty for a policy manual (because in many cases they were!)

These are generalizations, of course. I’ve been fortunate to work with a couple of schools that really get it and have devoted time, money and expertise to helping improve these mission-critical areas of their sites. We’re currently engaged with a great college client in a hard-core research, architecture and content strategy project for their financial aid, scholarship and billing areas of their site. A project like this doesn’t just help with recruitment, it helps make sure students enrolled at the college have access to information they need to STAY at the college. Can you say that you’re doing the same on your site?

Please, for the sake of your users, don’t stop at the home page. In fact, maybe you don’t even start at the home page. Find out what really matters to your audiences and start there. If prospective students want better academic and financial information, put your resources there. Talk to your enrolled students and find out if they really need or want that big portal you’ve been working on (we did that with a client once and learned all they really wanted was a better calendar). Find out what information your faculty need and if the website is the best place to get it. Determine whether or not that expensive alumni community is worth the time and money when your alumni tell you that they prefer to interact on Facebook and LinkedIn.

There’s so much more to a university website than the home page. Maybe someone will create another cartoon that helps people get that.

J. Todd Bennett is the co-founder and managing partner of decimal152, providing website [pre]design for do-good organizations.

Image credit: Flickr user Jeremy Brooks

Leadership / Politics — 5 Comments
21
Apr 10

When leadership fails, your website fails.

It’s been a little while since our last post, the Incidental Publisher. We were humbled by the great response. In fact, I was starting to work on a follow-up post when life took a detour.

A few weeks ago, I lost my sister to a sudden, tragic death. The circumstances of her passing resulted in her two young children being placed in state custody, leaving my family to pick up the pieces. During this time of grief and confusion, website [pre]design was far from my mind.

Miles away from home with nothing more than a cell phone, laptop and coffee shop wifi, I had to navigate a complicated labyrinth of laws, procedures, courts, state agencies, hospitals, non-profits and other organizations. I needed help. Many questions needed answers. Things needed to get done.

Like many people, when I’m looking for information I turn to the web. This time, I found the websites more frustrating than helpful. Each website was really bad and reminded me of the importance of my work.

I like to think that I know how to use the web to find stuff. I work on websites for a living. Yet I failed to get what I needed from dozens of websites. I can only imagine a less savvy web user trying to do the same, perhaps under even worse circumstances.

Here’s one example of many:

I performed a Google search where I thought I found exactly what I was looking for. Clicking through it took me to a page like this:

I still haven't found what I'm looking for

Aarrrgh! I encountered this message after several different searches (and not just on this site). With no other choice, I decide to give the “new” site a shot and found this:

The "new" DCF homepage

This “new” design didn’t look so new, leaving me to believe the search indexing problem on Google had been around for a while. Some of the problems with this site may be apparent just from the home page screen shot. (By the way, the guy on the left is the governor and the one on the right is the secretary of the department of children and families. Helpful. Oh, and that Venn diagram in the middle? That’s their navigation.) I never did find what I was looking for.

Instead I encountered a sea of messy, bloated, out-of-date and just plain broken websites. I wondered how all of these websites could be so bad. ALL of them?

Useless content. Navigation reflective of organizational structures. Jargon and meaningless acronyms. Poorly constructed and inaccessible designs. Broken search engines. A lot of talk about how they’re going to help me with little help provided.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, the intent of this post is not to rant about the state of government or non-profit websites. I’m sure you have visited sites like these hundreds of times. Heck, you may even be responsible for one. If complaining about your bad website actually fixed it, we wouldn’t have bad websites, would we?

So what’s the problem? Why are these websites failing?

Despite my difficulties on the web, I found some truly wonderful people working tirelessly behind the scenes in all of these organizations. Many of them are over qualified, over worked and seriously under paid. They are dedicated to their cause. These folks are not the problem.

It seems to me that this systemic failure is rooted in leadership and resources. So how do we start to make it better?

If you are the leader of an organization with a failing website, here’s my challenge to you:

You probably don’t know that your website is failing. You don’t use it the way that your users do. That’s why you need to talk to the real people who use your site and act on their feedback.
Your website is part of your core business, regardless of the service you offer. It’s not only a place to mention what your organization is doing, it’s a place to DO IT, too. Until you give the web the same priority as the services you provide, the people you serve will continue to be under-served.
The website isn’t about you. People in need of help or services don’t care who sits at the top of your org chart. There is a good chance that if you are a governor,a director, the CEO of a local non-profit, the president of a foundation or the chief of police, you are not a website expert. Your personal welcome message, news and design preferences need to take a back seat to the needs and expectations of your constituents.
If you don’t have the expertise within your organization, get professional help. You don’t have to spend a fortune to get a good website. Find experts in your area who care about your cause to donate their services. Ask donors for money specifically for this purpose. Look for grant opportunities. Whatever it takes—find partners who know what they’re doing and trust them to help you.

If you are a foundation leader, legislator or anyone else giving money to these organizations:

You are already funding the important work of non-profits and government agencies. Take it to the next level. Consider a requirement that a portion of the money be used for communications (specifically the website, where appropriate). If you don’t think this is important enough to fund, neither will those agencies receiving the money.
Help connect the pieces. I learned the hard way that many of the complex problems and issues we face require the help of many organizations working together. Find ways to bring together departments, agencies, non-profits and other groups to build online communities that aggregate their information and services to help your neighbors in difficult times. Provide the funding, training and support needed for these organizations to sustain these communities.

I know that there are MANY terrific non-profits, government organizations and their partners working tirelessly to create informative, easy-to-use websites. If you work for one of them, this post wasn’t about you. Keep up the good work and tell other organizations how you’re doing it, because for every one site like yours I suspect there are five really bad ones.

Your organization exists to help people by providing vital information and services. Don’t fail your constituents when they need you the most.