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Final Comp, with slideshow link

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 - 6:08 pm
  • gcampbel

ASUcomp1

This is the final comp for the new ASU Homepage as presented to the Web Editorial Board. The design included input by our great team of designers, but was primarily designed by William Atwood.

To view a slideshow to simulate the flash motion that the page will have click here. The intent is to have five rotating features at any given time. The second level of content will also change on a regular basis.

The design process has gone extremely well - thanks in large part to the community input. Thank you for your interest. We are going to begin the coding process on the page - so look for the new ASU home page coming soon.

Final comp with feature/news ›
Thursday, July 12th, 2007 - 5:09 pm
  • rjclark1

thumbnail of markup of ASU final comp

First and foremost, everyone on the ASU homepage redesign committe has done a wonderful job.  There are, however,  some basic usability issues that need to be tweaked in the ASU final comp.  They are broken down with the numbers corresponding to the marked up image as follows:

  1. Inconsistent labeling - should read Login or change the ASURITE login screens to read Sign On.  PRINCIPLE BROKEN: Users can get confused when they click on something that reads Sign On and are taken to a screen that reads Login.  Labeling needs to remain consistent across the site.
  2. Not a usability issue but Web should be capitalized.  Better yet, this textbox should remain blank as it is assumed that one is searching the ASU Web site. 
  3. more > is a context-less link.  It would be more appropriate to make the header the link like it is done under News and Events for two reasons...(1) link consistency and (2) makes more sense to users that rely upon screen readers to view Web pages.  Try it out for yourself using JAWS (free download). 
  4. Although many Web sites are using the term RSS, many users do not have a clue what it means... experts suggest using the term News, Newsfeeds, or Feeds instead.  Ask someone outside of technology if they know what RSS is, means, or does...
  5. Inconsistent use of same navigation icon.  It is labeled RSS under News and Events and Feeds & Podcasts under Explore & Connect. 
  6. May cause some confusion as they visually appear to be redundent navigation links.  This may occur more often when designers choose to stray away from the "standard" color and style of hyperlinks (the "standard" being blue and underlined for unvisited URLs). 
  7. Research shows that redundent links cause cognitive overload.  I'm sure the reason Search ASU and A-Z Index appears more than once on the page is for user convenience, however research shows this confuses most users. Further, users expect search functionality to be located at the top right corner of Web pages.

Putting the ASU Home link under the ASU logo is a great idea as many users do not know or realize the ASU logo links to the home page.

Another point to keep in mind is that readers scan pages in a letter "F" pattern so content that lays in the whitespace of the "F" is highly likely to be overlooked. 

Overall, the final comp looks great; ASU is moving in the right direction towards redesigning the home page.  Everyone working on this project has done an awesome job. 

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 - 1:30 am
  • cindifar
  • cindifar's picture

Rex - Thanks so much for these comments, we will definitely fine tune the page according to these issues. Some of them have to do with the template header and footer so they will first have to be vetted through the approval process first, but we will recommend those changes.

I really appreciate your attention to detail and your expertise on the subject (especially with all the fresh info/research you picked up at the Nielsen Norman Group Usability Conference). And thanks again for the time and energy you have put into gathering user feedback... don't know what we would have done without you.

Monday, August 13th, 2007 - 3:46 pm
  • hiroshi

Any chance that we can get a top-level e-mail link that allows users to go to both the student e-mail and the faculty e-mail? The recent roll-out of the Google page in place of the myASU portal alerted many of us that faculty, perhaps more than students, use the ASU front page as their launch page to check their email when they are away from their office computers.