What are you looking at?
The concept presentation took place in a windowless computer lab painted in a carefully chosen variant of one of the school colors. The president and her VPs-six of them-sat staring at the screen behind me as I talked and in the back of my mind I was screaming, “what are they thinking? What are they thinking?” And it wasn’t like they weren’t engaged. They had polite smiles on their faces and were nodding attentively, and I had, in fact, asked them to hold their feedback until we’d looked at all the concepts, but still, I wanted to know what they were thinking. Or more to the point, I wanted to know what they were seeing.
Reflecting on the meeting later it started thinking about what I see when I look at a website and realized I was still pretty much using a mutated-into-a-form-of-intuition version of a critique method I’d picked up in undergraduate photography class I’d taken to distract myself from writing papers about Restoration Literature. In evaluating the home page of an academic website, it works kind of like this:
1) What’s the first thing I notice about this homepage? Where does my eye go first? The logo? A tagline? Some feature or photo? Is it the use/overuse of a certain color?
2) What are the next two things I notice? I figure that’s by far the most new visitors are likely to notice before they find whatever they came to your site for in the first place—a degree program, tuition information, the “give now” button. (If they notice more than that before they find what they’re looking for, you’ve got an information architecture/navigation problem.)
Another way to think of this is what path does my eye take through the page, and if the first few things my eye lands on were addends in an equation, what would the sum be?
3) What does the design tell me about the school? Can I immediately tell what kind of institution it is without looking at the name? Is it big research institution? A small liberal arts college? Urban? Rural? Is it serious, fun, hipster, unpretentious, granola, traditional, innovative, arty, careerist? I should be able to accurately draw at least some of these conclusions in a second or two.
4) Then I usually start looking for stuff. I look for my first major when I was an undergraduate (physics). I look for admission requirements. I try to figure out what I’m going to do that night on campus.
Of course, while all this is going on, I’m also asking myself whether I like the site, and if I do, what I like about it, or what I don’t like about it if I don’t. How does the site make me feel? Welcomed? Impressed? Intimidated? Bored? The response to those questions are all valid and valuable, but, because I am not the market for most academic websites, they also need to be more carefully measured than the first questions I asked myself.
In case you’re wondering, the president’s response, once we got to the slide that said “feedback” was, “like that one, LOVE that one, don’t get that one at all.” And so I asked her all kinds of questions about what she loved.
Discuss this article
