In my previous post about the push and pull between marketing a site and making it usable, I try to make the case that the DU site leans too heavily toward marketing when all available data suggests usability is more important. However, on second glance, I believe I need to clarify my stance and I’ll …
Continue reading “Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 2”
Nick Denardis of EDU Checkup critiqued the University of Denver’s redesign and gave it a 94%. Pretty good. He liked the strong visual impact of the homepage, that content was geared toward addressing student needs and that the underlying code was done with SEO and accessibility in mind. What Nick didn’t know, couldn’t know, was …
Continue reading “Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 1”
There’s lots being said about Apple, Adobe and Flash support. This is the 6,342,213th opinion on the matter, but the first from me. First off, what’s the big deal? Well, Adobe and Adobe/Flash supporters are up in arms about Apple’s increasing discrediting/dislike/disbarring of Flash on the Iphone and Ipad (no, I don’t capitalize iPhone and …
Many higher ed institutions use Flickr to share photos with their constituents. We launched DU’s Flickr site this summer. We also set up an “internal” Flickr account for our overworked photographer Wayne. It was meant to cut down on his daily grunt work and, I’m happy to report, it has. Here are some of the …
Some random connections: Similar in that the “solutions” don’t account for the real audience that matters: patients / students Similar in that those with ultimate decision making authority are swayed too much by lobbyists and insiders Similar in that those in positions of power tend to be too insular in their thinking and don’t go …
Continue reading “Health Care Bill(s) & (Many) Higher Ed Websites”
Websites want to be chaotic. They don’t like order, hierarchy, or staying on brand. Your efforts to tame it or control it are largely futile. The best you can do is point it in the right direction and then keep on eye on it. Turn your head for just a minute and suffer the consequences: …
Recently at work, there was a discussion about link titles, their utility, when to use them, when not to and so forth. Link titles are those attributes you insert into a link tag that helps set expectations for users of where a link will take them. Conceptually, they’re easy to understand and rationalize. The hard …
Continue reading “Use link titles as a check on your architecture decisions”
I’ve noticed that in higher ed, the word “client” refers to anyone except the school’s target audience. It’s usually a department head, an administrator or a project lead — essentially, anyone internally associated with the school. In an agency setting, that would make sense. You answer to the people who hire you because they pay …
I haven’t posted for months. Not because I don’t want to, I do. The dearth of updates stems from an ever growing perception that what I write is hypocritical. By virtue of this site, I claim to have knowledge and insight into matters of strategy, IA and design, but in the 18 months I’ve spent …
I recently took steps to get out of my current, part-time MBA program and into the executive version. To get some questions about the switch answered, I met with a program rep. One of the topics she wanted to cover was whether I met the minimum requirement of 10 years work experience. Having been in …