As the days pass, "the Web" proves to be remarkably prescient nomenclature. The World Wide Web has infiltrated and entangled our lives much like its natural cousin. More noteworthy, however, is the way the Web has mimicked biology, showing the ability to metamorphose and evolve in a manner that would make Darwin proud. As the Web changes, the pages and people who are stuck to its digital threads must also evolve, or face the fate of those not "naturally selected."
The story that follows will resonate with many. The same scenarios are presently occurring across campuses all over the world. Redesigning a university home page is both necessary and challenging. Necessary because an epoch on the Web is six months and stasis for longer ensures that technological and design innovations have passed you by. Challenging because design choices are not science. Building consensus around one choice, especially at institutions which pride themselves on freedom of thought and action, is an unenviable task. 1 As our story unfolds, design and process weave together to produce a home page that is superior to its predecessor. The new page serves as yet another step in the evolutionary ladder of the Web.
The history of the Web at Yale follows a familiar course. Scientists and programmers, the early adopters of any new technology, latch onto the Web and produce the first "University Front Door." The results for the time (early 1993) were superb. Yale had a presence on the Web where the digital cognoscenti could hang ten.
By 1994, the world had changed dramatically. The early adopters had been joined by the technically savvy across disciplines, and the use of the Web both on and off campus grew dramatically. Academic Computing Services (ACS), fine purveyors of the "gopher" based campus information system since the early 1990s, realized that the Web was a mature information dissemination tool. The Front Door represented all of Yale, and required substantial managerial and technical care. The Web was now a major responsibility, and it was time to move that responsibility to an institutional home. Day-to-day operations of the Front Door were transferred to ACS.
At the same time that ACS assumed custody of the Front Door, the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) became increasingly concerned about the Web's public relations implications. The director of OPA convened a design group, and shepherded the creation of a new image, the "books," to be the main graphical statement of the Front Door. 2 The new image was grafted onto the pre-existing organizational structure, and the resulting Front Door served the University's needs through 1994.
By early 1995, however, the organizational schema of the original Door, basically unchanged since 1993, were showing signs of wear. The art of managing information, creating categories and identifying audience, had matured with continual use of the Web. Adding new links to the Front Door in an ad hoc manner quickly created a rambling litany of resources which daunted newcomers and created a skewed perception of the University's offerings.
The maturation of information organization mirrored a greater appreciation of the Web's importance at the University. University officers, through day-to-day use and conversations with sister institutions, now understood that the Web was a new form of publication, whose impact on Yale's image was equal to, if not greater than, standard paper fare. 3 As such, any redesign of the Front Door had to have University-wide approval. That approval would come straight from the top: the President.
In only two years, the Front Door had evolved from the exploratory musings of the technically enabled to an image-bearing tool that required the imprimatur of the President. To garner that imprimatur in an effective manner brought other challenges, however. A room large enough to hold key University decision-makers would be too large to actually create change. Large groups pontificate while small groups get things done. The solution was to divide the redesign process into two teams: the Advisory Team and the Design Team. The Advisory Team included those members of the larger University community, including representatives from the Provost's Office, the University Library, Computing and Information Systems (C&IS, the University computing organization), the Office of Public Affairs, the faculty, and the President's designee. 4 The Design Team included a graphic designer, along with two members of the library staff, the de facto University Webmaster and the Director of Academic Computing, who convened and led both groups. The two teams met in tandem to discuss goals and concepts for the new Front Door. Then the Design Team attempted to operationalize those concepts. The two teams would come together to discuss the Design Team's progress, and the cycle would continue. The new Door was born out of this iterative process.
The teams first identified a set of principles to guide the design process. The page should be small and compact, accessible in total via one mouse click (on a "standard" browser the image would take up the first screen, and a single click would scroll the text into view). The page should be designed primarily for visitors. 5 The page should be universally accessible, which meant that minimal "non-standard" HTML would be used. The page should have a "statement of purpose," which would make clear for whom and for what the page was designed. The page should be distinctive, yet easy to grasp. Summed together, the overarching goal for the Front Door was to produce appealing and effective access for visitors to Yale.
Visitors, however, are a heterogenous group, each wanting very different resources from the University. Relying on anecdotal and commentary evidence, statistics, and a good dose of common sense, the Design Team was able to subdivide the Front Door's target audience: scholars (academics), prospective students (admissions), former students (alumni) and the greater New Haven community (campus & community events).
With the audience defined, the Design Team went about the work of creating categories for the Front Door. What quickly became apparent is that categories based on existing University divisions (organizational topography) or sectional appeal (e.g., libraries, athletics) were limiting. Organizational topography can be daunting even for University insiders. Sectional appeal leads to the "me too" phenomenon. If one section is allowed on the Front Door, other requests naturally follow, and even if the sectional categories are well-conceived, a new sectional division will undoubtedly come into being, wrecking the underlying structure. Eventually, the Front Door will return to the "litany of links" model that the redesign was attempting to banish.
The Design Team wanted a minimum of categories, clearly defined and organized, that would put each visitor immediately at ease. If you were a prospective student, the Design Team wanted you to know, at a glance, exactly where to go for admission information. The solution was to use the particular segments of our target audience as category names. Arriving at the Front Door, prospective students would see "Admissions," and there find all the currently available University admission information, as well as links to other resources of interest to applicants. The same would hold true for alumni, and the other targeted categories. Where information crossed boundaries, links were duplicated in each section.
These links would eventually lead a visitor into YaleInfo, the campus information system, where the information actually resided. The Front Door and its appurtenant pages would serve to triage targeted audience members to the information that they wanted. For internal users, such a system would be unwieldy and prevent quick access to known resources. The first-time visitor, however, is thankful not to be thrown into the middle of an informational morass.
Such an audience-defined category approach fulfills the vision of the Front Door, offering elegant and effective access for visitors to Yale's electronic resources. The very effectiveness, however, highlights an intrinsic drawback to the system: what about visitors who wish to browse? Academia is littered with stories of scholars who made a critical breakthrough by rifling through a card catalog and following a flight of fancy initiated by random chance. Tight and efficient categories remove the opportunity for intellectual cross-pollination. Because of the varied and rich culture at Yale, the Design Team wanted a place to highlight interesting resources, without regard to category. The answer was the "Yale Sampler" section, which endeavors to present vignettes of life at the University. The sampler is rotated periodically, to showcase new or changing pages in the community.
The redesign complete, the new Front Door was released the world, and specifically the hyper-critical campus and alumni populations. The Teams were pleasantly surprised at the response. To date, the feedback on the new Door has been overwhelmingly positive. The new categories are intuitive, and the arduous process of finding information of interest has been made much easier. Certain users have bemoaned the lack of "glitz" that accompanies many web sites these days, but the majority has applauded the simple elegance intrinsic in the redesign.
The Yale Advisory and Design Teams have no illusion concerning the permanence of their work. While it is hoped that the organizational schema chosen will scale well, a life cycle of more than two or three epochs (18 months) is impractical. The Web will evolve further, and so will our understanding of it, so that what now feels visionary will soon look hackneyed. What will have a more lasting value (hopefully) is the process used to create the schema. Audience targeting, knowing who comes to your pages and why, is invaluable in the design process. So is keeping the design team small. Consensus building and participation from across the university is imperative for both the conceptual phase and the overall acceptance of a new front door, but that consensus cannot come at the cost of a bloated design force. With too many hands in the Web, process becomes hopelessly entangled.
The organizational outcome of the new Yale Front Door, here presented in a straightforward narrative, belies the difficulty that the Design and Advisory Teams had in creating the structure. Open discussion and debate, sometimes strenuous and heated, created a crucible that withered many lesser designs. Those that were "naturally selected" from the milieu showed both adaptability and vision, two qualities which will be indispensable for the continuing evolution of the Web. Darwin would indeed be proud.
1 This article is not meant to imply that industry is immune from these challenges. Industry is equipped with two advantages (in this context) that academia does not share: hierarchical control over subdivisions, and the ability to impel, rather than cajole, compliance and consensus.
2 Frank Tierney, a graphic designer from Yale University's Printing and Graphic Services, created "the books." The image was based on a portion of Elihu Yale's library, part of his original gift to the University. The different sizes and shapes of the 11 books conspired to form a stunning graphical milieu, not unlike the "Manhattan Skyline," in the words of Paul Mellon Professor of History of Art, Jules Prown. A distinctive identifier for Yale, "the books," were unlike anything then available on the Web.
While "the books" earned raves from the Internet community, they were subject to intense controversy among students, staff and alumni. The books were "humanity-centric," "scientifically bankrupt" and "failed to show the beauty of New Haven." One perturbed alumnus asked why we could not "...have a nice view of the Charles River, like Harvard." He failed to provide relocation funds with his critique.
During the re-design process, both the Design and Advisory teams spent many sessions discussing changes to "the books." Despite yeoman work by both Mr. Tierney and team members, in the end, no metaphor could be found that equalled the visual impact of the "Manhattan Skyline." A campus scene, no matter how beautiful, cannot display the academic or cultural richness of Yale. The designers finally compromised on a revamped version of the books, whose original impact was somewhat dampened by the exigencies of the improved organizational format. The graphical issue has not been laid to rest, however, and even now the teams are planning additional image work in the near future.
3 The value of a publication can be measured in many ways, only one of which is the number of eyes that view it. However, in a straight measure of exposure, Web publications transcend paper. The Yale Front Door main page is "hit" over 80,000 times per month, and institutional Web pages account for 1.2 million transactions in the same time period.
4 With hindsight, we would suggest that future advisory teams invite participation from the admissions and alumni segments of a university as well.
5 Existing resources (such as YaleInfo, the campus information system) were already focused on the campus community. The needs of the campus user are far different from the needs of the visitor, and by trying to design one page to be all things to all people, the redesign would do a disservice to both clienteles.
Rob Callum (robert.callum@yale.edu) is Electronic Publications Specialist in Academic Computing Services.
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