In case you’re wondering, that’s a screenshot of a CASE Gold award winner this year: the Online Viewbook from Arizona State University.
We’ve just completed the Judges’ Report for the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for Category 11, Websites. Read on for some thoughts about what we saw this year and follow the link below to download a copy of the entire judges’ report.
The judging this year was held in early April at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. We’re grateful to the university for hosting this year’s judging—and especially to Shelagh Pedeen and Laurie Zack for their excellent hospitality. Laurie has served as a judge for these awards for nearly a decade. This was his last judging: he retired in May. I will miss his insights and his contributions to future discussions about the websites we’ve viewed.
Category 11 includes complete institutional websites (35 entries; we awarded a silver and two bronzes) and individual sub-websites (89 entries; we awarded 2 golds, 3 silvers, 4 bronzes, and an honorable mention). We did see some good, even ingenious, sites this year. But our overall impression was that quality of sites was down and that there were many, many missed opportunities.
Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that there is a certain sameness that’s the state of the art for school, college, and university websites. It’s not that sites can’t be striking in their own right: it’s possible to create a beautiful, functional website that reflects well on an institution, attracts prospective students, and engages alumni. But now that many of the standards have been set, innovation occurs within a much narrower range than it did a decade ago. Maybe we can expect to see fewer sites that elicit a “wow” at first sight—but we see many more that we will appreciate the more we use them because their designers have attended to the many important usability details and populated the site with compelling stories, powerful images, and amazing video.
The most innovative sites we saw this year—those for Biola and ASU—were designed for prospective students. One could argue that sites focused on particular audience segments (prospective students, alumni, and others) can take more risks. If the sites are compelling enough—and their audience dedicated enough—they can use nonstandard navigation, offer up interactive Easter eggs, and break other rules. An institutional website has too many demands on it in terms of making its information findable to serve the needs of many different audiences to break too many rules or push too many boundaries.
Trends
Some trends we noticed this year:
A word about the importance of written submissions. Comments in the submissions that outlined how much testing had been done or how successful the sites were convinced us to give awards to several sites that we might otherwise have passed over.
Likewise, some sites might have fared better if they had demonstrated that the unorthodox choices made by their designers were supported by usability testing rather than whim. One of the judges remarked: “It’s not just about the numbers, even if you have them. It’s about providing context for your content and trying to serve your customers. Posting content is no longer enough—you have to think about providing a service and include a task-based perspective; that’s where analytics shine.”
To understand that context, we paid attention to the organizational work and cross-campus cooperation that went into building the backbone of some of these sites.
And the winners are…
Category 11a (complete institutional websites)
According to the description on CASE.org, in this category, “Grand Gold, Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards may be given for innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use … Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.”
Category 11b (individual sub-websites)
In this category, institutions can enter ”…innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use … Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.” This includes sites created for a special purpose (such as annual reports, fundraising, or news) or directed toward a well-defined audience (alumni, prospective students, current students, parents).
Here is a copy of the complete Judges’ Report, which contains further comments about process and extensive notes and comments about each of the award winners.
Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?