Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
Whilst doing some research on different university websites, I noticed the audience segmentation on Oxford Brookes’ site. A lot of the sites I’ve been visiting follow a similar pattern with ‘prospective students‘, ‘current students‘ and ‘alumni‘. Brookes have ‘future students‘, ‘current students‘ and ‘former students‘. Not only is this clearer (a lot of students that I’ve been talking to don’t know what alumni means), but I think ‘future students‘ sounds much more like beginning of a relationship with the organisation; that you will be a student here. Again, it’s a detail, but it makes a difference.
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Thursday, June 24th, 2004
I recently volunteered to help out a team at work that’s looking at a redesign of our homepage. As part of the brief, I’ve been looking at other university home pages to see if there are any useful standards we can benefit from, and to see what the competition’s doing. One interesting site I found is Napier in Edinburgh. Their home page is clear and I really like the different visitor-type graphics (e.g. undergraduate, postgraduate etc.); it’s definitely talking to a student audience, but without going over the top. Things change once you start to click around though.
I went to the Schools and Research Centres page and found myself unable to find an obvious link back to home. OK, it’s usually the logo. This page hasn’t even got a logo. What about that web address and phone number at top-left? Guess again. Ah, I see it now. It’s the little text graphic labelled ‘Home’, just below the green line. Nope that’s the research home page. Hmmm. Can you guess where home is?
See that little red triangle in the top-right. That’s it, or it’s supposed to be, but on this particular page it’s not working.
Yes, I could have clicked the Back button, and ordinarily I would have, if my browser (Firefox) hadn’t been greying the button out for some reason. But what about visitors that come to this page from a search engine? What would they have done?
Your home page is an important destination (that’s why there are so many arguments about it and why you put so much effort into it), give it the visibility it deserves with a clear link on every page.
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Wednesday, May 12th, 2004
The Missus was filling out an insurance form yesterday as our car was broken into. Like most people she hates filling out forms and quickly became frustrated. ‘They know who I am – they’ve sent me this bloody form. Why do I have to fill out my address details again? Can’t they put them in there for me?’
The insurance company can automatically put the same information into a letter so why not a form? This makes filling in the form a little shorter (after an event that is at the least an expensive inconvenience) whilst providing an opportunity for the customer to verify and correct their personal details. For the sake of some data merging the customer is once again left feeling annoyed.
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Friday, April 23rd, 2004
Blogs are interesting tools, but the blog’s most-recent-post-first format doesn’t allow ideas from earlier posts to be developed or expanded because they’re presented before the originals that spawned them! How can this be addressed? Re-editing? Supplemental posts? Or maybe this isn’t what blogs are for and a different tool like a wiki is required.
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Friday, November 14th, 2003
I was at a Jisc sponsered Managed Learning Event yesterday. During lunch I overheard someone talking about how they were wary of using streaming video because it’s not accessible and can cause problems for screen readers. Now streaming video is wide open to pedagogic abuse, but to not consider using it purely on accessibility grounds seems strange. When you consider the poor accessibility of many university campuses and the lack of access technology in lecture theatres it’s as if the person were saying ‘Well, we don’t give lectures because we don’t have an induction loop installed’.
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Monday, November 10th, 2003
… the W3 remix <http://w3mix.web-graphics.com/entries.php>.
In Jacob mode, note how the entries on the re-useit.com page are more usable because they include a little bio and most importantly a screen shot.
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