Back in February Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast at Interllectual wrote a short series of posts entitled: Why most University websites suck. The first piece in the series looks at the difficulties in defining the goals and audiences on Uni sites. I couldn't agree more. Our University website has struggled under the expectation that every user has: they will find exactly what they want within one or two clicks from the front page.
This is not such an unreasonable expectation, I agree. The problem comes when we have a multitude of different types of users all trying to find what seems like an infinite number of different types of information. All groups of users have different expectations of the site and most are focused only on what they need. This leads to confusion when they are confronted with the options that don't apply to them.
Such expectations are a difficult load to place on any website. I raised the issue of separate sites for different audiences last month. I believe it is the only way we can address this problem. As the areas of the University websites for different audiences become more complex we are going to have to look at creating dedicated sites. In terms of marketing this offers the opportunity for domains dedicated to audiences and fully contained sites that are easier to manage in terms of IA.
As Andrea points out though, this would mean telling a whole lot of people that they should change the home page in their browser, that the main university website isn't the portal to the world, as it used to be. I agree this would be difficult but I think if people can find what they want on a well-designed site, any resistance to change may be overcome.
In part 2 of her series, Andrea addresses institutional inertia, something I think we're all familiar with.
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