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Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@uoregon.edu
In the Fall 2003 Computing News (http://cc.uoregon.edu/cnews/fall2003/webstudy.html) we discussed some of the mechanical issues associated with university web page delivery, including "natural minimum web page sizes" and the web servers and Apache modules these universities chose to use. In part two, we'll look at some design trends we're seeing in higher education home pages.
We will now consider a couple of those design trends.
I. Segmentation
We had received some feedback that a growing number of college and university websites apparently had begun to explicitly segment their audience into narrow categories on their home page. In evaluating that claim, we found that indeed, 78.4% (135 out of the 172 sites in our study), now do this.What is segmentation? A university might choose to offer a number of parallel versions of its home page: one version for prospective students, another for current students, a third for faculty and staff, a fourth for sports fans, a fifth for alumni, a sixth for parents and families of students, a seventh for donors, an eighth version for members of the news media, and so forth.
Visitors to the website are typically presented with a choice of website "views," often via a link explicitly titled, "Information for..." The site visitor's page choice is sometimes remembered via a session cookie (or a persistent cookie). At other times, the visitor's choice is not saved, and merely serves to determine the next page shown. (Saving audience state via persistent cookies can lead to bizarre usability problems when done on lab computers or other shared systems employed by diverse audiences.)
Examples of segmented university websites: UCLA is one example of a university that segments its website--in this case, into a total of eight visitor categories. Rice University, another university site that segments, breaks its audience into thirteen categories (and not surprisingly, Rice prominently offers a page explaining how to use its "Audience-Focused Homepages" for those who find the whole process rather baffling).
In some cases, the degree of microsegmentation is rather stunning: Carnegie Mellon, for example, in addition to a number of relatively routine segments, carves off no fewer than three categories of visitors: "faculty visitors," "general visitors," and "corporate visitors" while also offering a page for "researchers."
In other cases, some audiences are distinguished by their absence. At UCSB, for example, there are links for "future students," "current students," "alumni & friends," and "visitors," but there's a strange silence when it comes to a "faculty/staff" segment (see Figure 1 below).
Presumably, UCSB faculty and staff are expected to be the default audience for the default version of the UCSB page, but their absence from what's otherwise a fairly inclusive list is still a bit disconcerting.
Sometimes the decision to segment simply reflects a desire to accommodate more direct links than could reasonably be crammed into a single integrated page; segmentation obviously makes more real estate available, and reduces the need for a web page designer or web oversight committee to tell some folks no, their sites won't be getting directly linked. In other cases, segmentation appears to have been done simply because other sites were doing it, with no discernible substantive rationale and largely undifferentiated page versions for each of the different audiences!
That lack of differentiation at some segmented sites is not surprising: it can be quite difficult to keep half a dozen or more different home pages in sync and updated. For example, consider the relatively straightforward issues associated with creating just three or four fresh news items that are uniquely relevant to each "carved-off" audience! That is quite a task, and thus it isn't surprising that sites quickly begin using common news items across all their "different" segments.
Unsegmented university websites: The remaining 37 sites, university websites that do not employ explicit segmentation include the UO, Berkeley, Cal Tech, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Washington, and Yale.
The approach the current UO home page takes is typical of this group. Rather than explicitly asking users to categorize themselves, we take a more subtle approach toward guiding users where they need to go. For example, if you look at the UO's current home page, you'll notice that we carve off some audience segments via direct links (Alumni, Sports, The Arts, Visitors), while offering other links that are important to particular audience segments directly from the home page.
Consider the current UO home page links of interest to prospective students and currently enrolled students:
• Prospective students: the UO's current home page includes direct links to admissions, financial aid, housing, students, the academic calendar, the catalog, the class schedule, the campus map, the bookstore, and so forth.
• Enrolled students similarly have direct links from the home page to web email, DuckWeb, the calendar, catalog, class schedule, weather, major Internet search engines, computing, and the library, etc.
We believe this sort of hybrid design, as used at the UO and a number of Ivy League institutions and regional competitors, will eventually be seen in virtually all university home pages because it improves the transparency and navigability of the site, and because it reduces the user's click count when trying to access crucial data.
II. University "Portal" Websites
A few years ago, universities were under tremendous commercial pressure (as well as substantial peer pressure from those who'd already jumped on the portal bandwagon) to move to a "portal" model for their institutional home pages.
Of course, one of the first problems universities faced was figuring out just what a "portal" actually was. A good definition has always been elusive, but there was fair consensus that a portal would:
In some cases, portals were also billed as a way for universities to raise revenue via the sale of online advertising. Universities were told that soon "everyone" would have a true portalized home page. Portalize or die, they were effectively told.
University administrators were also told that the straightforward secure websites they'd been deploying (like the UO's DuckWeb), sites which allowed students to perform administrative tasks online such as registering for classes or looking up grades, were not portals. Students would not routinely log in to websites of that sort (unless they had a specific administrative task to accomplish), and it was extremely unlikely that anyone would make one of these secure administrative websites their default home page.
So now that two or three years have gone by, where are all the university portals? Has the "portalization of higher education" actually occurred? No.
No universities in our study sample has a portalized home page, and only 36 schools (about 20 percent) even have a link to a web portal from the school's default home page, often via a none-too-prominent link.
Examples of universities that have a portal linked from the home page include the "My<whatever>" portals at Albany, American, ASU, Buffalo, Georgia, Miami (Ohio), Minnesota, NJIT, North Carolina, Northeastern, St Thomas, Tennessee, Texas Christian, UC Davis, UCLA, University of the Pacific, Virginia Tech, Washington, Wisconsin (Madison), William and Mary, and WPI, and comparable sites with more unique names, including BYU ("Route Y"), Catholic ("Home@CUA"), Delaware ("UD&me"), George Washington ("GWebPortal"), Tulsa ("CampusConnection"), etc.
In other cases, an institutional portal may have been marginalized to the point where it is only being targeted at a smaller audience, such as current students. For example, UC Santa Cruz's home page is silent about the existence of a portal site (you only learn it exists if you dig down into its segmented "for enrolled students" website); the University of Connecticut clearly defines its target audience by labeling its portal site http://www.students.uconn.edu/
We believe that university portals are currently at their zenith, and as time goes by, those universities which did experimentally deploy a portal will most likely retire that model and return to a simpler functional model.
Other schools, still under local pressure to develop a portal by administrators who may not realize that the portal craze has largely passed, may seize upon the ambiguity in what makes a portal a portal, and simply rename their existing functional secure administrative websites to have a "portal-like name," thereby allowing them to "declare victory" in the "portal wars" while minimizing the hassles, costs, and risks they might otherwise face.
III. Animation
Another area of web page design which occasionally gets mentioned is use of animation--having the pictures on the home page change slide-show style, for example, or incorporating the use of Macromedia Flash to "increase visual interest or impact" or to grab attention, much in the way that many commercial banner ads are animated. (In looking at whether or not a site used animation, we explicitly excluded use of rollovers, e.g., things like pull-down menus or text highlighting that occurs when a mouse is passed over an area of the page.)
With that definition in mind, when we look at our 172 study sites, only 17 sites (Cal Poly, Clark, George Washington, Gonzaga, Loyola (Chicago), New Jersey Institute of Technology, New School, Pepperdine, Rutgers (Newark), SUNY Buffalo, University of California Riverside, University of Chicago, University of Colorado (Boulder), University of Dayton, University of Georgia, University of Maine, and Yeshiva)--less than ten percent of the study sites--made any use of animation on their institutional home pages.
Clearly, the perception that "everyone" is deploying animated images or Macromedia Flash-enabled home pages is not borne out by the empirical data from our study.
IV. A-to-Z
One problem that virtually all university home pages face is how to handle the laundry list of links to departments, programs, labs, initiatives, functions, and "stuff" that need linking, a function that is currently handled under the home page "Departments" link at UO, as it is at some other universities (such as Duke, the University of New Mexico, or the University of North Carolina).
At a growing number of other sites, including 60 of the 172 in this study, the preferred name for that omnibus listing link now appears to be "<university abbreviation> A-to-Z" or "A-to-Z Index" or a full listing of letters along the lines of "Index A B C D E F G H I [...] X Y Z" or possibly a "cutesy" permutation such as "Departments A2Z."
The other alternative to "Departments" or "A-to-Z Index" that is commonly seen is for that type of link to be labelled "Site Index" or "Index" or "Directory" (although that last nomenclature will often be confusing to users looking for a phone or email directory).
V. Verbose News Items
Some universities view their home page as a "table of contents," while others view the home page as more akin to a university magazine.
Universities which lean toward that latter role tend to feature verbose news items on the institutional home page. For the purpose of our study, a news item was considered to be "verbose" if it included a headline and more than a single sentence of accompanying text. A simple headline (with no accompanying text), or a headline with one line of "teaser" text was not considered to be a verbose news item. Of our 172 sites:
A few sites had a very large number of verbose news items: Georgia Tech and Lewis and Clark each had pages with 6; USC had 7; Boston College, 9; Rensellaer, 10.
In the next issue of Computing News, we'll look at the use of specific technologies such as favicon.ico, Platform for Privacy Preferences files, and robots.txt files.