Meet Expectations by Design

That conversation often starts from the premise that if a visitor to your website can recognize your org chart based on your information architecture, something’s wrong. But centering your website around visitor expectations goes beyond how pages are organized or how the content is written. Meeting (and exceeding) visitor expectations also includes anticipating the needs of your visitors from a design and programming standpoint. Once you have a handle on how visitors are browsing your site-the technology they’re using and how they’re looking for information-you can help them along in a number of ways. Here are a few ideas.

Too Big, Too Small
Within the next year the 800×600 resolution will be all but extinct. In the meantime, it represents a small (but significant) portion of your website traffic. If you’re thinking of redesign, should you yank off the proverbial band-aid and increase your layout size now (at the risk of alienating some visitors)? Or is it better to stay the course a few more months and wait for those last 15” monitors to fall by the wayside?

Dartmouth College opted to do both. Instead of locking their layout into a static size, they’ve designed a layout that expands to fit the visitor’s browser no matter how big or small. Those with large monitors see a website that fills the width of their bigger screen—and because of the layout flexibility, visitors with small monitors see a site that fits perfectly within their window as well. Instead of dictating a single viewing experience, Dartmouth left the question of screen size in the hands of their visitors.

Scale Up, Scale Down
There’s a good chance that in the time you spend reading this paragraph, a 17-year-old prospective student and a 71-year-old alumnus will both visit your website. And there’s an even better chance that one of them will find the size of the text on that website too big or too small.

Many savvy visitors know that text size can be adjusted within their browser—though many don’t. Some of the time though, increasing text size results in a layout losing any sense of coherence as content overflows its intended boundaries and spills across the page.

University of Virginia’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences site meets this challenge by gracefully and seamlessly scaling in size. As text size is increased, content grows in size but and the dimensions in the layout grow, too, accomodating the need for additional space. And because the layout expands proportionately with the text, the design integrity is maintained throughout.

Better Search, Better Results
Nearly half the visitors to a typical website don’t browse-they go straight to the search box. If your visitor is too impatient to click a few links trying to find what he or she is looking for, it’s safe to assume that dozens of extraneous search results will not be well received either.

The University at Buffalo has embraced the search-first reality and created a top-notch federated search. A keyword search for “John Simpson” (UB’s president) returns a series of results broken down by topic. In the “Best Bets” category there’s a clear link to the Office of the President page and in the “People at UB” category there’s a link to his profile within the university directory. Not only is the UB search engine simplifying search results by organizing results into logical groups, it’s also simplifying the search process by combing through both web content and application content (like the university directory). Both these features make it much easier for a visitor to quickly and

painlessly find the right information.

These examples demonstrate that design is not only about color and line. Like all your work in online communications, truly effective design means putting your visitors first, and using technology in creative and innovative ways to meet their needs.