“Meet Kenyon People” (MKP) is one of the few features of the Kenyon site that seems to be almost universally appreciated throughout the Kenyon community. The fact that these profiles include staff and faculty as well as students is greatly admired. In general, the Kenyon community finds this content to be interesting, engaging, and useful.
With this in mind, we’ve definitely planned to retain MKP in the new site design. However, we’d like to take advantage of its popularity to increase its scope and prominence somewhat, and make it more appealing and accessible to the public.
Better pictures
The one thing we at White Whale don’t like about MKP is the headshots. The circular frame seems to clash with the rest of the site design somewhat, and the small window doesn’t give much space to express the individuality of the subject except for his/her facial expression and general appearance: this in turn puts a lot of pressure on the photo, no doubt making it harder to pick a good shot.
We’d like to see an MKP with much larger pictures. There might be a reduced version of the primary picture that would appear in sidebars on the site (not unlike the current MKP). But on the profile itself, and perhaps on a homepage MKP feature, we’d like a photo that shows more than just the face: some personality, a sense of place, an academic context.
We have noticed some undesirable behavior in the rotation of the MKP features on the homepage. While we’ve been told there are dozens of features, only about 8 or 10 MKP’s seem to ever appear on the homepage.
We’ll rewrite the Javascript that generates these features, to achieve exactly the results Kenyon is looking for. We may also want to categorize or “tag” MKP features (so we’ll have more control over which features appear where) or “weight” certain features to appear more frequently.
First person narratives
Currently all the MKP features are written (it appears) by the Office of Public Affairs. While this results in journalistic stories that are always well-written and compelling, it does create some distance between the reader and the subject. That is OK in some cases, but when you’re trying to develop a relationship with an important visitor (like a prospective student), it would be ideal to give a better sense of what the MKP subject is really like as a person. The best way to do this is to let her speak in her own words.
We thus recommend that some (if not all) MKP features be written in the first person. The fact is, this will require almost as much work from Public Affairs as writing the profiles from scratch; it can be very difficult to convince people, especially students, to write in their own voices. An easier approach would probably be to record interviews with MKP subjects and “ghostwrite” them into first person narratives (with the subject’s approval of course).
In a similar vein, we’d like to see the punchy titles (“Rising Rocker,” “War Stories,” “Kenyon’s Own”) replaced (or augmented) with the name of the person being profiled.
As an alternative, you might consider creating a new category of MKP features—”Kenyon Speaks,” for example— devoted to these first person accounts, letting the other stories remain as is. But we do believe moving to first person narratives is a very important step toward more compelling site content.
Moving pictures
A picture is worth a thousand words, which means that a 30 second video— at a typical rate of 20 frames per second— is worth about 600,000 words.
The MKP features, or the Kenyon Speaks first-person subset, ought to be enhanced with short video clips. More on this idea can be found in our document on “Media and podcasting.”
Kenyon people in context
The MKP features are useful and effective, but they are also dead ends. Once you’ve read a profile— except for the occasional embedded link in the profile text— there’s really nowhere else to go.
We’d like MKP subjects, both in the profiles themselves and in the various teasers for MKP profiles, to be accompanied by links of interest. This is illustrated in our initial Kenyon design mockup — in addition to linking to the profile of this fictional Kenyon dance student, we’ve included other links, including one to the Dance department. This approach will better integrate MKP features with the rest of the new site.
