With a Little Help From Your Fans

Last year, at least one institution scuttled its rebranding effort when students, faculty, and staff took to Facebook and soundly panned the identity before the planned launch. Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, is hoping to avert this outcome by asking its constituents—at least, those who are Facebook fans—to vote on a new logo. Stevens will roll out this logo in celebration of its 140th anniversary.

The poll is the latest step in a process that began last summer. The resulting logo and institutional rebranding is linked to plans for Stevens’ anniversary celebration. Michael Schinelli, the Institute’s associate vice president for graduate marketing and communications, notes that their design partner, Spiral Design, had developed identity materials. “We were going through the normal approval process until earlier this year when we talked about getting the community to give input on the designs. I suggested that we create a Facebook campaign that would allow stakeholders to vote—and also grow our social media fan base.”

Spiral developed four concepts. Schinelli reports, “The designs went through a series of revisions and we settled on four that we thought were both divergent enough to offer a choice and strong enough to be a winner. The poll also has info on the design elements, such as the authentic characteristics, history and aspirations that would identify Stevens better than our current logo. These include our gatehouse, the river (we’re perched above the river, overlooking New York City), Alexander Calder’s artwork (he was an alum), the University motto “Per Aspera, Ad Astra” (Through adversity to the stars), and the S for Stevens.”

Stakeholders can cast their vote via a Facebook poll to be launched today. The poll will be open through 9 a.m. Friday.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Broad Engagement Abhors a Caveat: or, a Giant Learns to Fist Bump Without Crushing the Townspeople

NBC Chicago’s masthead. 03 November 2009

Today my city is “laughing about Jessica Simpson ripping Melrose.” I’m not specifically, but it’s plausible that many other Chicagoans are.

Clicking on the quote (notably displayed in NBC Chicago’s masthead) brings me to a page showing that over half of sampled Chicagoans find Ms. Simpson’s diatribe amusing. Further, a quarter of us could care less, and the rest of us are evenly split as being either “thrilled,” “sad,” “furious,” or “intrigued.”

How did a large corporation get us to admit this without coming across as our painfully-uncool-but-tries-to-be-hip Dad? Essentially, it did three things:

1.) It scaled itself down to a smaller, more personable entity. For the purposes of this audience, NBC became NBC Chicago. Bravely, “NBC” isn’t even stated. It’s implied by their logo. (Granted, it’s not that brave when your logo is as well-known as theirs, but for a media behemoth, this act is a veritable trust fall.)
2.) It lowered the barriers to participation. If you’re a member of their site, all it takes is some brief introspection and a mouse-click to voice your opinion on the subject.
3.) It overtly displays the results of participation. Your response to a survey gets added to the tally, the results of which show up larger than the headline of the story. This kind of treatment says, in a very immediate way, that what you think, dear reader, is as important as the subject matter itself. Stating a group’s opinion as a kind of citywide status message on the site’s front page, reinforces that message and invites discourse.

Plot twist!
Point number two is qualified: “if you’re a member of their site.” I’m not. I didn’t participate in the poll. Although, I made it most of the way towards doing so. I skimmed the article, formed an opinion, and clicked on “intrigued.” Then, one last hurdle popped up requesting my email address and a password in order to become a member. As a member of dozens of other sites already, I felt the weight of all of my username and password combinations (which are attached to one or more of my four main email addresses) bear down. In fact, each time a site asks me to create a new account I become increasingly wary and less likely to do so. This time was no exception, and I closed the window and left the site.

Obviously, this hurdle wasn’t too high for the others who participated in the Simpson/Melrose survey, so the value of getting an email address might be enough for NBC to keep it in place. One begins to wonder, though: how many others like me have they lost as potential participants? Moreover, asking for identification corrupts the notion that they genuinely want everyone to participate. I’d posit that more value is gained by getting me to dive into the site and stick around than by getting my email address. If they emailed me anything, I’d most likely just delete it. Or, I’d open it and immediately scroll down to the bottom to unsubscribe.

Them’s the brakes, NBC.

The Moral
While they did more than most to engage their audience, NBC might want to reconsider that last step. My advice to all of you: keep the barriers to participation as low as you can afford to, and keep the longview in mind when you define “low.”

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Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School

Immersing yourself in social media isn’t easy when you manage communications and marketing for an education institution, even a small one. There’s already a lot on your plate: events to produce and publicize, magazines to put out, a website to update. That’s certainly true at the Baylor School, a boarding and day school in Chattanooga, TN, where Barbara Kennedy, associate vice president for external affairs, manages communications.

Kennedy’s team is responsible for marketing, media relations, publicity, PR, publications, a magazine, BaylorSchool.org, and programming and promoting the school’s summer programs. It’s a small staff: just Kennedy with a director for summer programs, a webmaster, a designer, and a freelance editor who helps with the school’s magazine.

Despite the existing workload, Kennedy knew that it was important to learn about social media and to incorporate these tools into her work. “I knew that I had to be responsive. I’m a 25-year PR veteran and I knew I had to adjust to these changes myself. And I know our audiences expect us to communicate in this way.”

So in spring, 2009, she and Bernard Fertal, Baylor’s webmaster, began exploring social media. “We wanted to be in the lead, but we didn’t want to proceed without really thinking through the advantages and disadvantages,” Kennedy said. “I think some people thought social media was just a fad that would soon fade away—and still others chose to ignore it. But we looked at it as a revolution in how we do our jobs.”

After some experience, she added, “Bottom line: we look at social media as a powerful way to leverage traditional marketing and communication tools that we already have in place.”

Pilot project focused on a class trip

After doing some exploration and research, Kennedy developed a pilot project to launch over the summer, when she had time to focus on it: a travel blog about a student trip to Washington D.C. with photos posted on Flickr. “This was only read by the students who were on the trip and their parents and there wasn’t much interaction, but it gave me a reality check on the time commitment. Then we started tweeting. And I had already been immersed personally with Facebook, so the Baylor School fan page was the next logical step once classes began in August.”

These continue to be her focus. “I’m amazed at how quickly the Facebook page took off: it has grown virally, as has @BaylorSchool [1216 fans and 103 followers as of 28 October 2009]. We plan to do a radio promotion directing people to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, so we’ll see how those numbers grow.”

Kennedy’s main focus is The Baylor Blog, which feeds the fan page. She said, “Since I am generating all of the news items on our website and much of the information that we share with parents and students on a regular basis, I do the updates on Facebook and the blog.”

Tweets are drawn from the school’s daily announcements and other web content and lead back to news stories on BaylorSchool.org. Fertal manages @baylorschool and handles most of the tweets.

As a communicator, Kennedy appreciates the flexibility social media gives her in telling a story—and allows her to watch how her stories spread. “As someone in communications, the feedback and data I get on posts is invaluable.” As an example, she talked about some photos she posted of Korean students celebrating a Korean holiday. “I’m interested to see how many of those kids will interact, showing me if it’s viable to reach students in Asia this way. I may not get much interaction, but I’m watching what happens.”

Kennedy also appreciates how much she can learn about her audience. “Our total fan base is predominantly ages 13-24, almost evenly split male/female. As a boarding school, it is also of great value to see that 1,002 of our Facebook fans are from outside of the state, and 39 of those fans represent 19 different countries. Having the data also informs my choices on what to post, and will no doubt shape our communication strategies in the coming months. For example, 100% of the interaction has been from females (ages 35-44, 40 percent), (ages 45-54, 40 percent), (ages 13-17, 13 percent), and (ages 55+, 7 percent).”

She continued, “This week, we have pulled in 17 percent participation from males and our younger fans are becoming more active. So I’m thinking harder about posts that I feel will keep connecting with them. Our next step is to leverage this information with admission and fund-raising.”

And this data helps her to gain support from Baylor’s board. “I felt that some of my colleagues were just being polite when I talked about social media, but when I shared some of this data with the board, they really responded. They got that it was a whole new way of communicating.”

Challenges? What challenges?

When asked about challenges in putting social networking into practice, Kennedy said, “It has been ridiculously easy, but it was personally scary for me to let go of some of the control. I was blocked for awhile on creating the fan page because I wasn’t sure anyone would respond to it. Silly, huh?”

Kennedy and Baylor have not encountered any discipline problems or issues with their own ventures in social networking, but that doesn’t mean that Kennedy hasn’t had “an aha moment” around potential abuses of social networking. “A couple of years ago, a reporter ‘friended’ some students on Facebook to get a quote regarding a controversial issue on campus. He ran the story with a student’s quote and I was just blown away. Because I also handle media relations, it was a teachable moment for me, the student, and others in our school community. That was my first experience with Facebook—and, when you think about it, it’s a miracle that I grew to love it!”

Although being an active blogger and Facebooker take more time in her day, it hasn’t been a big burden for Kennedy. “Honestly, it takes me just a few more minutes a day. I would be developing news content for the website anyway, so copying and pasting into the fan page and tweeting about it—is really just a few extra minutes.”

Even the interaction is manageable, Kennedy has found. “I don’t follow up much, though I do spend time reading comments and think about how they might inform what I post. For Twitter, I’m looking at what people are reading, RTing, and I’m thinking about they say. This takes 10-20 minutes a day. I could spend more time on it, but I don’t. I have to set some boundaries.”

The effort she’s put into social media—and its payback—have resulted in some plans for the near future:

• Silverpoint, Baylor School’s web partner, is designing a mashup page that pulls together the school’s various feeds; it should go live this fall.


• Kennedy is also exploring how she can incorporate a Flip video camera and iMovie into her communications retinue, and her immersion in social media is causing her to rethink how she will present Baylor’s magazine when it moves online. The current print magazine is mailed twice a year to 10,000 people. Kennedy isn’t sure what an online version of the magazine will look like, but she is sure that her effort won’t involve slapping a PDF on BaylorSchool.org. “I’m thinking about how we can tell stories through video and audio,” she said.


• Finally, there’s a need for other voices to join the conversation online. She’d like to include more student voices, but that hasn’t happened much yet. One of her concerns is the amount of time they could spend: “I don’t have a lot of confidence in their level of commitment to it—they have a whole lot of things going on,” she said. And she’d like to see other departments involved in contributing to and sustaining Baylor’s social media activities. “We need other voices to join the conversation and in doing so contribute to the effort,” she said.

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about online life at Worcester Academy.


• A case study of social media in action at Beaver Country Day School
.

Update: The mashup page went live the week of 2 December:

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Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner

How do you know when you need to do something about your website?

Maybe you’ve heard from your admissions team that the site doesn’t stack up against your peer or competitor institutions. Maybe faculty members have spoken up about much-needed services. Incoming freshman may have pointed out holes in the information they were searching for last spring. Maybe visitors aren’t using the site the way you want them to. Or maybe the site is just dated and ready for attention.

For many of our colleagues in education, deciding that it’s time for a website redesign isn’t hard. The challenge is figuring out how to get started. A successful website redesign requires funding, executive-level support, campus-wide buy-in, and thousands of hours of involvement from faculty, staff, and students from throughout the community. For the small group or individual charged with getting the ball rolling, the hurdles can seem impossibly high, even if your institution is a small and close-knit independent or professional school.

mStoner has completed hundreds of web development projects with schools, colleges, and universities of all sizes, and we’re the first to admit that there’s no single, magic solution.

To help clarify some of the basic decisions you need to make—and to help you know where to go from there—we wrote “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner.” Our white paper lays out some of the questions you need to ask about your needs and how you might begin to approach them. Some projects don’t need help from outside vendors or consultants, but if yours does, the white paper suggests how you can find the right partner to meet your needs.

For a copy of this white paper, contact Katie Jennings (katie.jennings(at)mStoner.com) and she’ll be happy to send you one.

And if you’ve read “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner,” please contribute your thoughts and comments about the issues it addresses in the comments to this post.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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EdUI 2009: Recap

Having finished both days of EdUI, I’m left with a single complaint: I wish I could’ve attended more sessions. For their first foray into conference coordinating and hosting, the EdUI team pulled off no small feat.

Edu-geekdom was well represented: IT pros, developer ninjas, design nerds, library techies, social media mavens and more populated each session un-siloed, curiosity piqued by a line-up of web and usability all-stars. Some highlights:

Jared Spool with a photo of a Julia Childs crop circle.

The In-N-Out School of UX Veritable godfather of usability, Jared Spool, delivered the keynote on “Cooking Up Gourment User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget” which proposed that a great user experience doesn’t require a huge budget—just meticulous preparation (skillful implementation), quality ingredients (content), and creative approach (smarts).

One of my favorite takeaways from this talk dealt with how successful UX teams tend to view process. To Spool, a process is just a series of steps, any steps used to accomplish a task. It differs from a methodology in that you might never use the same process twice. Methodology, on the other hand, requires refinement and repetition. Successful teams hone the tricks and techniques they employ during a process—they don’t concentrate on constantly re-working their methodology (the possible outcome of which, Spool warns, is a dangerously myopic dogma). Focusing on technique allows a team to improvise when necessary.

When You Stare into the Webcam, the Webcam Stares Back at You For the plenary session, Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, presented a surprisingly moving look at anthropology through the lens of modern digital culture. He made the point that as information architects, designers and developers, we’re “architects of human relations.” We shape the ways in which people interact. Adding the ability to vote down a particularly vitriolic comment on YouTube, for example, civilizes the overall conversation. Designing and developing communication tools that are intuitive and fun to use encourages people to connect with strangers as well as friends.

As architects we enable what Leisa Reichelt calls “ambient intimacy.” Ambient intimacy is the YouTube vlogger who addresses highly personal secrets to everyone and no one in particular. It’s also us as the unseen but acknowledged crowd that acts as a receptor for that kind of information. Videos on this can be seen at Wesch’s KSU page, or visit his working group site Mediated Cultures for more information.

Finally, a Way to Get Lost in the Virtual Stacks The surprise hit for me came at the end of the conference. Bess Sadler, a Research and Development Librarian at the University of Virginia, did a walk-through of Blacklight, a project created by the University of Virginia Library that has grown into a thriving open source community.

Blacklight attempts, amongst many other things, to “replicate the serendipity of browsing library stacks.” UVA’s newly indexed music catalog demonstrates this well. Prior to the Blacklight implementation, a search through the music library required specific terms like a composer’s name or the exact title of a song in order to return useful results. Now, users can search using broad terms like a work’s era, genre, country of origin or language to get an overview of related works. Additionally, non-traditional assets like coins and works of art can now be cataloged. Play around with the catalog University of Virgina Library.

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Share and Tell

Here’s a sampling of some of the links that got passed around the mStoner offices in the last month… links dealing with social networking, higher education, search engines, and yes, streaking.

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Award Winners, CASE Awards of Excellence 2009: Category 10, Websites

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This category includes special-purpose websites ranging from campaign sites to alumni sites, virtual tours, admissions sites, annual reports, search sites, and others.

Full report on the judging, complete with comments about each of the award winners, is here [it’s a PDF].

The entry form for the category states:

Grand Gold, Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal awards may be given for innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use. Do not enter only your homepage for evaluation. Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.

Category 10A: Complete Institutional Websites
This category included sites designed to represent an entire institution, from the home page down. In the past, we’ve noted that it’s difficult to have all the parts of a great site come together at once at an institutional level, and this year was no exception. You’d think that a small institution—a school or a college—would have an advantage here because the scope of work is narrower than that of a large university.

Gold
George School

Silver
Northland College
SUNY-Potsdam

Bronze
University of Virginia
Georgia Tech Research Institute

Category 10B: Individual Sub-Websites
These sites—developed for special purposes for particular audiences such as prospective students, alumni, or others—allow institutions to develop a coherent, deep web experience for visitors. It’s often easier to build a special-purpose site: there are usually fewer political issues, a clearer purpose, and more of an opportunity to measure results—assuming, of course, that there is a plan in place to do so.

Grand Gold
The Road to Xavier, Username: hopsonk1, Password: Twitter1

Gold
Nazareth University Flight of the Flyers

Silver
Boston University Annual Report
[url=http://www.bu.edu/admissions]Boston University Undergraduate Admissions Website{/url]

Bronze
Boston University, College of Fine Arts Website
Cornell University Photography Image Library, login: case; password: case1
Hobart and William Smith Colleges Daily Update
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Events Calendar
McGill University
Virginia Military Institute Don’t Do Ordinary Website

Additional Resources

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Rethinking “Visitors”: Just Call Them … Friends

Three years ago—Tuesday, 30 May 2006—to be exact, I posted ”Just Call Them Visitors”, which remains one of my favorite posts on this blog. I believe it’s one of the most important, too.

I stand by most of the sentiments expressed in that post, starting with this one:

People don’t “use” websites, they “visit” them. So just call them visitors, please, and design websites to make visitors feel welcome, to help them find what they want, and to delight them.

People visit websites to learn something, or to do something that’s important to them. It’s not about the way the site looks, but about making sure that it’s built from the ground up to facilitate your visitors achieving their objectives. Note the emphasis: it’s all about them and what they want.

Of course, 2006 was a long time ago—decades, maybe even centuries, in Internet time. The term “Web 2.0” was just two years old and the meme hadn’t yet slipped into wider consciousness. Now it seems almost passe, since early adopters desperately seek a new buzzword to make them sound cool. Four months after my post, Facebook, which launched in 2004, opened itself up to everyone age 13 and older with a valid email address. No one had even heard of Twitter, which launched in 2007.

So it was different back then. Now, we not only have “visitors” to our websites, but also we have “connections,” “fans” and “followers.” And today a web presence should be larger than a single website. We need to go where the people are and many of them are hanging out on other websites and spending time on social networks. The conversation is going on around us (and in some situations, without us). And in 2009 it’s essential to be part of those conversations.

Still important: Take a deep breath, pay attention to fundamentals

Social media seem easy, deceptively easy. As social media and social networks assume more importance and complement (and maybe someday—though not yet—replace) our websites as places to connect and learn, let’s keep in mind that there are still fundamentals that must be considered before launching a cool Facebook widget or get too far into planning a social media initiative.

I know that sounds so—how can I say it?—old-fashioned. Uncool.

But we still need to ask: for whom are we doing all this stuff, anyway? Whether we are producing an institution’s website or developing its social networking or social media presence, we’re designing for … people. Or at least we at mStoner are. And that should be your paramount consideration, too.

Start with your own website. To help people find information about your institution, you have to design your website for the needs of your visitors. Discovering that what they come to your site to do, to find, to learn is the fundamental challenge of a redesign. What do visitors care about? When you determine their needs, then you can provide information that is relevant to them and make sure they can find it through intuitive organization of that information and great search.

You want to develop compelling content that communicates essential truths about your institution. And you want to ensure that you’re using your content strategically across your site, syndicating it to places where it is relevant and where visitors will discover it when they arrive on a page through an external link or a Google search. Your content should be so compelling that it motivates visitors to take actions that are important to you: explore further, ask for more information, apply, give, sign up, engage.

But today you don’t want to keep content locked up in your site: you want to syndicate it to sites across the web where it can help you to connect to people who already care about your institution—or may come to care about it. I’m thinking of places like Flickr, Youtube, LinkedIn, iTunesU, Facebook. In other words, go beyond your own site to where your audiences are and make sure they can find your content there.

Wait: there’s more

Note, please, that it’s not just about great content in 2009. Today’s visitors don’t just want to visit your website for great content, they also want to engage—that’s why there’s “social” in social media and social networking

It’s time to ponder the deeper implications of “social” media and what that might mean for your institution.

You need to pay attention to the depth of commitment engagement can take and the effect that it can have on how offices run. If you launch a Facebook presence and don’t have plans for tending it and participating in and engaging with the community that will develop around it, why bother being on Facebook in the first place? It was one thing to develop and launch an alumni community in the 1990s: then, you had to convince your audiences that there was value in being part of the community and selling this notion was hard work. Fast forward to 2009: many of the people you’d like to reach are already using Facebook. Many of them are eager to connect with their institutions: in fact, so eager that they probably launched their own affinity groups before you joined the party.

So the real question for today is not about the “how” or “why” of being part of this community, but “when.” It’s not enough to designate people who will develop your content and keep it flowing. You need to think through who is going to manage your community presence and, crucially, what else he or she won’t do, because site management will take a fair amount of time and you’re not likely to get another staff member any time soon.

And for those people that you’re engaging with through Facebook, LinkedIn, or your own social network, maybe it’s time to come up with a name besides “visitors.” Shall we call them “friends?”

So, let me ask this: are you prepared for what will happen when your friends visit your web presence in 2009, not only at YourInstitution.edu but on Facebook, LinkedIn and everywhere else on the Net?

Note: I’d like to thank my wife, Denise Lyons, for her input on this post.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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How to Win a CASE Gold

People often ask me, “Mark, how do I win a CASE Gold medal?” And I say, “Hoss, (I address everyone as ‘Hoss,’ including my mother) here’s whatcha gotta do . . “ And then I wake up.

Back in my waking life, two mStoner-designed sites were honored last week. A site we did for the George School won a CASE Gold Medal, and a site we did for the College of William & Mary was one of three nominees for best overall web site on EduStyle.net. We are very pleased for both clients and defer much of the credit to them as these were very collaborative—and very rewarding—projects.

They were also very different projects. George School is a small Quaker boarding school. William & Mary is a public university with the nation’s second oldest college at its core. And the nature of those places required very different sites, and, to a certain extent, different processes. But both projects shared certain attributes that helped make them successful. Those attributes add up to something of a formula for giving any marketing or communications project a school undertake with consultant the best chance of being extra special.

Do lots of intake, most of it with students and faculty. Obviously we need to know the president or headmaster’s vision for the the school. And we’ll need to talk to the Admissions, Development and Alumni Relations staffs to get sense of the school’s competitive situation and how it is currently perceived by its various audiences. But if we’re going to make a website or a suite of enrollment pubs that represents the school in an accurate and compelling way, we have to talk to the students who choose to go there and the faculty who choose to teach them. We need to know what they like about the place and how it fits their own sense of themselves. We have to absorb as much of their enthusiasm for the place as possible. Put another way, our job is to drink the Kool-Ade. The client’s job is to serve it to us. (And just to belabor the point, Kool-Ade is made from students and faculty who love the school and are enthusiastic about its mission.)

Test thoroughly. Use the results thoughtfully. One of the things mStoner does with its intake is develop a message platform—basically a short list of things a website or viewbook should be saying to anyone who reads it. Then we give that message platform and a creative brief full of insights about a school’s students and competitive situation to teams of writers and designers and ask them to develop two or three (sometimes four) very different-yet-audience-appropriate ways of expressing that message platform. Then we test those ideas with current and prospective students to see which ideas convey our key messages most compellingly. We always do an online survey. George School, like many of our clients, chose to supplement the surveys with on-campus focus groups, which are great because in addition to letting us probe for more detailed feedback, it gives us a chance to see body language and other kinds of response that surveys don’t capture. Getting a chance to see kids ooh and ah over the winning concept made George School much more comfortable moving forward with a challenging concept. After much consultation, Ball State, which won the EduStyle “Best Overall Site” award a year ago, deliberately chose a design the came in a close second in testing because they felt it better reflected the school they wanted to become. William & Mary was faced with a similar choice and decided to go with the winner.

Trust your institution. This is probably the toughest one, particularly now when prospective students and their families are particularly price sensitive and feel obliged to go where they’re getting the best deal. But to get a student to apply in the first place, they have to want to go to your school. And that means you need to be as appealing as possible to the students who are the best fit. Both George School and WIlliam & Mary knew they weren’t for everybody. George School wanted to highlight their International Baccalaureate program. William & Mary wanted to remind people that their sometimes-overly-studious student body knew how to have a good time (guerilla a capella, anyone?) But both schools were otherwise comfortable in their own skins and willing to let go of those prospects who were not likely to be a good fit anyway. And it’s much easier to come up with an engaging, meaningful creative idea when you’re trying to say one clear thing to a particular audience than trying to be everything to everyone.

Trust your consultant. Okay, this one is as much on us as on you. We—or whoever your communications consultant might be—have to earn your trust. With George School and William & Mary we did our best—as we always try to—to make the process as collaborative as possible and to listen to the client’s needs and the reasons behind changes when they requested changes. In return, they listened to us when we occasionally pushed back on changes. In addition to making us all feel good about the process, that respectful back and forth made the designs better.

So there you have it, Hoss—a four-stop process to getting a website or a viewbook that says something authentic and compelling about your school. We can’t guarantee that it will win you an award, but we feel reasonably confident that it will win you enthusiastic students who fit your institution.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
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Usability Testing Notes

After all these years of building sites, I still breathe a quiet sigh of relief at the end of usability testing. Indeed, after awhile one develops a sense of what will and won’t work for various sites, but it’s always nice to know find that one has planned and executed well.

One of our clients just launched a resource site for parents in Illinois—a project for which we’d built in both wireframe testing and post-launch testing. Yesterday, we sat down individually with nine participants and had them complete various tasks and comment on the site as whole. Some good feedback fell under “things people are always happy about,” like “the bright and crisp photographs of people” and “clear and consistent navigation.” My favorite takeaways from this particular round of testing:

1. Interactive doesn’t always equal added value. Early in our planning, the client asked about creating an interactive map for all of the counties in Illinois—flashy rollovers and animation and such. I’d remembered that for another project—one involving countries and continents—we found that some people were hard-pressed to locate places like, uhm, Europe. That in mind, I wondered whether most people could rightly recognize their county. It seemed that the expense of programming that map outweighed its actual value, and the client agreed. I knew when one of the testing participants located Lake Michigan and Chicago on the left side of the state that we’d made the right decision. Sometimes, a low-fi alpha list just makes more sense.

2. Except, when it does equal added value. People’s appetite for video—and their tolerance for lower production-quality stuff—has increased so dramatically. I was astounded and impressed with the requests for additional multimedia on the site.

3. If you think it may be a little confusing, it’s really confusing. Both the client and I thought that certain acronyms—even with explanatory text around them—wouldn’t make sense to people outside the organization. We were right. Duh.

4. Paper prototype testing still has value. Four years ago, I had client take me to task for recommending that we test wireframes—”SO late 90s,” she said. Well, now it’s late 00s and I still find wireframing has a lot of value. We tested wireframes for this site early on and came to clarity (at a fairly low cost) on the sorts of titles and site structures that would make the most sense to target users. As a result, the list of changes we need to make post-launch are few and mostly simple—nothing that requires a fundamental restructuring of the site. Paper prototyping, it’s a good thing.

P.S. We’ve used MORAE software for years, but for those of us craving mac-native testing software, Silverback is wonderful. Give it a try if you haven’t seen it in action already. 

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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