User-Interface Design

When designing a good user experience it‘s important to remember these four principles, which should be a part of any usability or user experience specialist‘s toolkit.

Make it informative - first and foremost.

The tone and voice of the School must ring true and this can best be done by presenting yourself in an informative way. By setting a tone of "discovery" versus selling, which can be established through copy and content, the correct reflection on your brand personality is established. Some key pointers regarding tone.

1. Make sure your home page details the purpose of your site clearly and concisely and quickly directs visitors to the information they need, yet provides prospective students aspirational content that encourages them to navigate further (see www.brocku.ca )
2. Make sure visitors can see where they are going and where they have been (breadcrumbs) and ensure they can get Home from every page of your site.
3. Make it easy to apply - and ensure that the online application/inquiry/admission process is logical - and surrounds the prospective student with contextual information that retains interest and diminishes drop off due to frustration or just getting lost!
4. Make the experience intuitive.

Keep it consistent

• Maintain your brand standards whenever possible. Invest in the creation of a branding style guide for the University that translates to your online presence.
• Use CSS (Style Sheets) to create consistency and to ease updating.
• Use clear and consistent labeling from the top-level pages down through the lower-level pages of the site.
• Place similar information together on individual pages and create a consistent manner of representing content on pages.
• Content should be consistently written and presented throughout the site and in marketing and advertising materials (we do have a "Writing for the Web" training module).

Keep it honest and communicative

• In today's social web authenticity is the key. Credibility is vital-especially when the goal is to collect personal information. Developing a credible presence can be as simple as making sure the site has no typos and that links should not be broken.
• Information should be accurate and presented in a familiar format (that is why video on the web has taken off. Web is what TV was in the mid-20th century and human (visual) interaction - the benefit of web video - is incredibly realistic.
• Make it easy to contact you. Provide multiple ways to connect, convert and keep contact areas contextual.
• Get back to any requests within 24 hours.

User experience design process, web strategy, and user persona documents.

The graphic below outlines our methodology for this process.

1. Content Inventory

• Content List (what do you have?)
• Content Evaluation - What type of content? Is it up-to-date? Is it critical? Can you get rid of it?!
• Architecture - What are the broad categories (i.e. course descriptions, faculty profiles, admission information, etc.) Focus on broad category names as well as hierarchy or relative importance
• Interaction review - identify all points of visitor interaction with the site
• Technology review - what technologies are in use? Are they up to date and best suited for the purpose?

2. Personas

• We develop personas (normally 5-10)
• These are audience stereotypes developed from user research findings
• They act as design tools for thinking about features and functions, not character studies
• We use personas as a basis to write scenarios -- which become Task Models
• Personas are useful in keeping design team mindful of people's needs, rather than simply "user functionality"

3. Task Models

• Here we apply personas and what they might look for and check this against the information on the site and the pathways to that information.

From this point we create "painted" wireframes based on new Information Architecture, web strategy, and user personas.