Interview: CFANS Web site redesign

This is the third in a several-part
series of interviews with communicators who have redesigned or
updated their Web sites with the University templates. If you have
redesigned your site or have a site to suggest for these interviews, let us know.

In this edition: Forum member Rachel Lam
on the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS) Web site

What were your reasons for redesigning the site?
Our old website had grown quite a bit since we created it several years earlier. Information was often buried and hard to find. In addition, we needed to move our site out of our old CMS and into UMContent. This was a great opportunity for us to reexamine our structure and content and to freshen up the general look of the site.

What kind of user research or user testing did you do?
We did some informal surveys and focus groups to discover what info people were looking for and what they had trouble finding. We used that to create a demo of the new site and then did usability testing with the Usability Lab to see whether our new structure and design were easier to use.

What factors went in to the organization of the site?
We looked at our stats to see what pages people were visiting (or searching for) most often and then tried to make them easier to get to. For example, "Majors & Minors" was one of our most popular pages, but it took 5 clicks to get to it. Now it's just 2 clicks from the home page.

How did you think about the visual design of your site within the context of the University brand?
We used the University's new templates as the basis for our site structure and design and picked a color scheme that harmonized with maroon and gold.

What was the biggest challenge, and how did you get past it?
I think our biggest challenge was going through all of our content and asking: Do we need it? Is it up to date? Where should it go?

How did you manage the project and keep it on track?
Honey VanderVenter did a great job with organizing regular meetings and checking in with people to make sure content revision and uploading was still on track. I focused more on helping with organization issues, accessibility, and developing templates for the site.

What did you learn from the process?
The usability testing was really eye-opening. Sometimes we discovered that people were looking for information in a part of the site we hadn't expected (like wanting to find "Majors & Minors" under "About CFANS", rather than "Undergraduate Students"). We also learned that some of our terminology didn't make sense to the users, so we spent quite a bit of time trying to find more appropriate words.

How are you evaluating the redesign's success?
I think the biggest sign of our success is that people have been telling us how much easier it is to use the new site. We don't get nearly as many "I couldn't find ____ on your website" emails as we did in the past.