“Show not Tell” our brand values

Posted on November 20, 2008 by Rik Williams
General.

prototyping

As part of my MSc in Human Centred Systems we have been tasked to “re-design city.ac.uk” as coursework for the Human Computer Interaction Design module.

As part of our initial inspection of the existing web site we identified the following areas that require further investigation and testing:

  • The University places too much emphasis on “telling” stakeholders, particularly prospective students, what our brand values are rather than “showing” them (e.g., ‘About City’).
  • The Parent:Child nature of the primary navigation confuses users as they move deeper into the hierarchy a site. Users become disoriented and need to revisit higher levels of the structure (the homepage (site or University)) to regain their bearings.
  • Media either adds little value (large graphical hyperlinks on the University homepage and Gateway pages) or is under utilised (photos on text heavy pages, videos of the student experience).
  • Content that is presented along political and departmental lines (e.g., ‘For Business’) rather than on task and user centric lines (e.g., ‘Recruit a Student Intern’).

I’ll blog any interesting thoughts and findings as we progress with the assignment, but, in the meantime, what do you think? What are your thoughts about city.ac.uk?

0 Responses to “Show not Tell” our brand values

  1. Tim says:

    Hi Rik,

    I agree with you apart from the about For Business. This does not really sound like a department to me but an audience. It may well be, however, that underneath you find the content only of the one department and reflecting the structure of this department – but I am not saying that this is the case for this particular department.

    Tim

  2. Adam says:

    Hi Rik;

    Interesting to hear – I’m going through the same process at the moment – I have been tasked with redesigning the Research pages to incorporate the entire Research and Enterprise remit, so that ‘Business’ can be focused on providing materials for external users.

    I’m currently using a programme called Compendium to represent the sites in an overview node/link diagram – It is very useful. Sorting out which pages are intended for whom is the first and most effective way of whittling down the complexity. I’ll tackle that first, then worry about the sub-menus…