Showing posts with label planning. Show all posts

What is information architecture?

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As I mentioned in the previous post, building a web site is a lot like building a home.

The process first starts with identifying requirements. Requirements define what the end result will have (or won't have), and determine how much time and resources you can spend.

From there, a blueprint which incorporates the requirements is developed; it shows how the requirements come together, relate to one another, and provide a first look at how users will navigate the end result.

The CI Web Refresh Core Team and Stamats have wrapped up the requirements for the new CI site (as outlined in the executive summary shared in a previous post), and are now working on a new "blueprint". This process is formally known as information architecture (IA), and includes the following activities:

  • defining what kinds of spaces are necessary on the updated site, based on the requirements outlined in our strategy; 
  • determining the naming/labeling of the spaces;
  • organizing the spaces and showing how they relate to one another; 
  • visualizing how people will move through the spaces; and 
  • confirming that the spaces and their labels make sense to their users.
Over the next several months, the Core Team and Stamats will be working closely with campus stakeholders to verify that the information architecture addresses these issues. The phase is expected to finish in October. 

Campus visit with Stamats May 2-3; feedback sessions

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During the first phase of our strategic engagement, the Stamats team will visit campus to conduct small group interviews with key campus stakeholders on Wednesday, May 2 and Thursday, May 3. 

Each of these group feedback sessions are being organized around either a key audience (current students, faculty, etc.) or a key area of University function (Admissions, Advancement, Student Affairs, etc.). Interview groups will be limited to 6 participants each.

Students: click here to register for a student feedback session; FREE PIZZA and beverages will be provided at each session!


Faculty: click here to register for a faculty feedback session. 


Can't attend a feedback session? We still want your feedback! You can tell us about how to improve the CI web site using the Community Feedback Form.

Thanks in advance  for your participation and continued support of this project, and please contact Melissa Bergem if you have any questions. 

A new refresh project...really?

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Some of our readers may know that the University home page underwent its last major refresh in 2005. 


What you may not know is that the University home has undergone at least 8 significant (and incremental) refresh cycles since the August 2005 launch. Don't believe me? You can use the Wayback Machine on archive.org to take a look at a visual and architectual history of our web site. 

Overall, continuous and incremental improvement strategies have worked well to keep the University web site running smoothly while balancing demand for our limited human and financial resources. So why is this a good time to do another major overhaul? Here are a few thoughts:
  1. Web as a strategic communication tool: we know from our 2009 web research that over 80% of current and prospective students we polled stated that the University web site is their primary means of finding out information about the University. If nothing else, we expect those expectations to increase over the next 3-5 years, so we must take action to manage this anticipated demand.
  2. Social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube: we are all using it, and the University as an institution is using it as well. However, our web site and communication strategies generally aren't taking advantage of the power of social media to generate open discourse.
  3. Mobile: mobile web usage is exploding, and will only continue to expand. If our University's web presence isn't mobile-friendly, we risk alienating large groups of audiences.
  4. Infrastructure: over the last 2 years the University completed 2 major Web infrastructure projects: migration to our new web content management system (EchoCI) and deployment of new web server infrastructure to support it. We now have a solid hardware platform on which to build the next iteration of the University's web site. Along with these tools, we can leverage our years of expertise in web standards-based development to ensure our new site is both highly usable and accessible.
  5. Convergence: the time is right to tackle these issues. Our University's leadership recognizes the importance of these issues and is willing to commit the necessary resources to address them. This gives the University an opportunity to not only make our Web presence look and work better, but also to develop strategies that will improve our ability to communicate more effectively over the next 3-5 years. 
To respond to these factors, the Division of Technology & Communication has begun planning work for an overhaul of the University web site, including the home page, top-level pages, and sub-sites; campus-wide planning activities for that project are expected to begin in early 2012.

In our next post, I'll begin to outline the steps we plan to take to accomplish our objectives, the resources we'll need, and how we will engage the University community throughout the project. 

In the meanwhile, we're certain that there are other good reasons to complete a University web site refresh right now. Do you think the University web site should be refreshed now? Why or why not? Post your comments here, we look forward to hearing from you!