Aug 14 2011 at 12:54pm
In my last post I offered a critique of the (not-so) new University of Waterloo home page. The next question is, how do these things happen?
Before I get started, I’d like to be clear that the points offered up in this post are gross generalizations, and certainly wouldn’t apply to all universities. These are just some of the issues I experienced at Waterloo—there are others that I won’t go into. I’m sure people who work at UW or other universities can think of additional factors to add. These points are also referencing the home page, although most of the factors listed apply to the rest of the web space as well.
Those of you who are familiar with web design in higher ed have surely seen the infamous venn diagram cartoon from xkcd:
When this was originally posted I remember seeing some talk about “web managers” not understanding usability. At least in my experience (as a former university web manager), that’s not the case at all. There are several problems at the root of this: Read more…
Posted in Design, Usability, Web Culture
Jul 27 2011 at 11:07pm
I’ve recently come across blog posts from earlier this year about redesigning on spec, and redesign and problem solving. This is timely, because I’ve been working on this post about the uWaterloo web redesign for some time now. I think this is a case where there was a lot of “design” done for the sake of impact without actually solving problems. Now that I don’t work there anymore, I’m free to make some honest comments it. How refreshing!
Until recently I was the “web manager” for the central Communications department. I was on maternity leave for most of the redesign process, but I did make some plans for it before I left (that weren’t used, to my knowledge), and worked intimately with the delivered designs after I got back. There are some things I really like about it, and some things I really don’t. I’m going to focus on the home page here, since I think that’s what where a lot of problems are. The other areas are okay, particularly some of the content and information architecture.
I’m going to refer to Jared Spool’s wisdom throughout  this article. I attended his workshop on “Designing for Content-Rich Sites” at DrupalCon in March, I think his work is very relevant here. Read more…
Posted in Design, Usability
Jun 06 2011 at 12:53pm
As most of you probably know, I recently left my position at the University of Waterloo. I wanted to post a little bit here about how that came about and what I’m doing now.
What happened, in a nutshell, is that the University decided to transfer the technical part of my job (including all coding), from Communications to IT. There is often a battle over who “owns” the web in higher ed. The same goes on at Waterloo.
The problem for me was that the job I had was probably about 70% technical. And that’s being conservative. I was responsible for the front-end code and back-end applications that supported the University’s communications efforts. Read more…
Posted in Personal
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