We believe the Kenyon site’s top level navigation (About Kenyon, Academics, etc.) will be primarily used by prospects and other outside visitors. Internal users will find their own paths to the content they need, either through gateway sites, search, or browser bookmarks.
Aiming the main navigation toward external users lets us focus on internal audiences separately, by creating quick access tools and well-made gateways. Imagine a page full of links, search boxes and directory lookup tools: bad for prospective students, great for Kenyon staff. We’ll make sure internal audiences can get where they need to be quickly.
We know it’s a pain, and it’s a point we’ve made many times already, but we have to put it in print. A new Kenyon site design simply must feature URLs that reflect site organization. If there is a page called Courses in a section called Academics, the address of that page must be something like www.kenyon.edu/academics/courses. The current x12345.xml solution is confusing and disorienting.
Distinguishing between external audiences and internal ones, and building this understanding into our IA, will allow us to lead users more effectively to the content they’re looking for. This process of “leading” should always be kept in mind throughout the site development.
Currently, the only reliable way to access administrative offices is by guessing what audiences they’re geared toward, and proceeding through that gateway. We think that’s confusing: one of the primary audiences for administrative offices is administrators from other schools, and those folks don’t fit into any of the traditional audiences.
We think there should be a clear category of administrative offices, accessible through main site navigation, with a comprehensive listing of all the offices at Kenyon, grouped intuitively.
The clearest navigation issue on the current Kenyon site is the proximity of two similar-sounding links: Current Students and Student Life. The links are literally less than a centimeter apart. There’s no way we can assume visitors will intuitively understand that the former is a portal and the latter a content page.
There should be no confusion of this sort in the redesigned site. Creating visual hierarchy will help us draw that distinction.
In the case of departmental and administrative sites with long lists of hard-to-parse links, we’ll try to walk a fine line. On the one hand, we’ll definitely try to suggest better, more intuitive organizations where possible. But in the cases where visitors really are accustomed to these lists (as we believe is the case with Kenyon’s Provost site), we’ll try to balance that approach with the possiblity of creating quick-access search tools (as seen on Haverford’s Quick Access page, for example) to let people quickly narrow down a long list.
Kenyon’s Google appliance isn’t returning high-quality results. We will help Kenyon improve its performance by working with the appliance’s built-in capabilities (such as incorporating user suggestions) as well as cosmetic fixes (like giving keymatches a very conspicuously highlighted style).
The search engine must also be modified to allow site-specific searches, such as academic department sites.
Based on our knowledge of the Google appliance and Google Enterprise (click here for a list of the Mini’s features), we believe we can improve the search engine a great deal without adding any new code or functionality. We’re willing, within the scope of our contract, to dig deep on the Google appliance’s back end to help Kenyon take advantage of all its capabilities. If we determine that custom code of some sort is required to make the searsch meet Kenyon’s needs, we can present a proposal.
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