Kenyon: Better gateways

It’s smart of Kenyon to provide link-heavy gateways for students and faculty (with similar portal-style pages for parents, alumni, and the community). These pages, which users are often encouraged to make their browser homepages, can be very helpful for internal audiences and frequent site users.

But we think Kenyon is missing some opportunities with these gateways, and would like to suggest a series of changes to gateway pages that we think might improve Kenyon’s ability to serve and speak to these important audiences.

We understand that Kenyon has tried a number of approaches to gateway pages in the past, including some of the strategies we’re proposing here. The fact is, gateways are a delicate science; lots of different user types bring different expectations to the table. We believe that if we stick to a basic goal— creating a page with quick access to frequently used tools, that is engaging and nice to look at, and provides a reason to come back— we’ll be fine.

1. Include interesting, dynamic content in gateway pages

In their current form, the gateways simply present a page filled with links. While such a page might be useful for some folks— especially, we suspect, older audiences— we don’t think that approach is as attractive as it could be. Most browsers of the Kenyon site will develop particular paths to get to the pages they use most frequently: either by setting browser bookmarks, or memorizing a path of clicks from the Kenyon homepage, or even saving e-mails containing links and clicking from those. And certainly they may use the gateway pages too. But a simple list of links provides no real reason to return— the gateway fulfills the same function as, say, a long list of browser “favorites,” except it’s not customizable.

We thus propose that space be reserved in a new gateway for a feed of news, feature stories, images, and any other content that’s being produced at Kenyon of particular interest to particular audiences. For example: if there was an “Image of the Day” feature on the student gateway, and some news of interest to students, they’d have a reason to return— this would increase the gateway’s audience and give Kenyon a more valuable channel for communicating with students.

In the end, the student gateway might appear largely similar to the main Kenyon.edu homepage, but specifically designed for students’ needs and interests. Then you could push users to make the gateway their homepage, knowing there’d be a benefit to them for taking that step.

2. Better organization of links

Currently the faculty and student gateways are alphabetically organized lists of alphabetically organized links. We think that’s too much calculation to ask of a user in search of basic information. Instead, we recommend fewer categories, with longer lists, organized more intuitively into broad groupings. We can of course assist in this process.

3. Make it easier to give feedback

There’s a link for feedback at the bottom of the gateway, but we think it should be MUCH more prominent. Gateway users should be told something like the following: “This page is designed specifically to be useful for you, and we need your help to make it as useful as possible.”

4. Explore customization

The fact that the gateway pages live on their own subdomain (gateway.kenyon.edu) suggests to us that these pages live outside the CMS and incorporate code in some way. The button selectors— “More Columns,” “Turn Descriptions On,” etc.— suggest that some work has been done to give users the option of customizing their view of the content.

The fact is that we don’t find the button selectors very helpful. The decision between two and three columns feels somewhat academic, and the descriptions are sometimes helpful and often redundant. However, that basic framework— perhaps even the same code— might be used differently to let users customize the actual content they’re viewing, not just how it’s displayed.

Students might even be able to select from a list of links and news feeds they’d like to see on their gateway, if technologically feasible. (We’ve created some tools like this in the past that we’d be happy to demonstrate.)

5. A bulletin board

The gateway pages provide an ideal opportunity to invite users to post their own events, notes, or other items of interest for the rest of their community to see. We see this page working like a bulletin board (in the cork-and-staples sense, not the Web forum sense)— users might post announcements of upcoming events, news snippets, invitations, etc.

It might function like one of Kenyon’s email lists: just another way to get the word out about something interesting. Certainly a list like this would be moderated, but not heavily. Instead of a calendar, which is ruled by dates and times, we see the gateway board as a place where a notice might be posted, live a few days, and then expire.

Having the opportuntity to post one’s own notes on the board would certainly increase use of a page like this, and might over time encourage a sense of community missing from the current gateways.

If this idea takes hold, we’d be happy to put together a simple development plan and cost estimate.