We’re on the right track …

This study indicates that our current approach to presenting the vast and varied content on the Williams website is on the right track. We are offering the right kinds of content groupings (by user group and by subject area)

Most participants grouped items together in ways that affirmed our use of “landing pages” or “portals” for both user groups and content areas. Participants consistently identified content as belonging to specific groups (parents, alumni, donors, faculty & staff, students, visitors) and specific content areas (About Williams, Admission & Aid, Calendars/Events, Search/Directories, News, and Academics).

but …

There are too many links on the current Williams homepage.

The instructions indicated that items that did not belong on the college homepage could be left unsorted. Every item in the sort was left unsorted by at least one participant, and 51 out of 75 participants left at least one item unsorted. ie, Not one item was sacred to all participants, and 68% indicated that there were items on the current homepage that did not belong there.

Items most often left unsorted include: conference office, bookstore, multimedia, sustainability, WCMA calendar, music dept calendar, publicity. Although an item may not “belong” on the Williams homepage, it still belongs on the college website … somewhere.

“It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.” *

Our challenges are:

• to winnow down the links on the homepage to the minimum necessary to get users moving in the right direction
• to arrange and name these links in a way that inspires “mindless, unambiguous choices” of where to click next.

Submitted by

Heather Clemow
Web Content Developer
Office for Information Technology
Dec. 5, 2011

*Steve Krug’s Second Law of Usability, found in Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (a book I highly recommend as an enlightening fast read for the web redesign study groups).