With this redesign, our goal is to bring you that just-in-time computing info you need even more quickly and easily and hopefully introduce you to some services you didn't know ITS provided but are glad we do.
Here are a few of the improvements in this round of the website.
We heard from some folks who said our information was sort of buried, not presented well on our home page. The home page was dedicated to a lot of spotlights of individual services as well as news items and other ads. People asked, "where's the beef?"
Ok, we heard you. Now it's front and center, composed of fewer categories for ease of "cognitive load," as the social scientists like to say, presented with some examples of each category underneath.
Those category listings tend to present our services by their function (e.g., "file storage") instead of by name (e.g., "IFS"). So we added an alphabetical listing of our services by name at the bottom of the page for those who know the name of the service they're looking for.
We tried not to overload you, but present you with samples of the substance up front to help you make your navigation decisions.
We're trying to make navigational pages and also some explanatory pages less text-heavy, so you can scan information, get where you're going, and find what you need quickly. We'll keep working to give you enough of what you need, but trim the fat.
We understand that the majority of our users are regular folks with some knowledge of computing but who are primarily using computers to achieve another goal. They are not generally the superuser ultratechnical types who live and breathe computing, and they don't want to have to sift through a bunch of overly technical material to find the answer to what they want to get done.
So the majority of our site is dedicated to these regular users, with the more technical information relegated to sections labeled "For IT Staff." If you happen to want the extra level of detail on a subject, feel free to peruse those sections, but if not, it's out of your way.
Aside from the usual testing of our pages to work with the major browsers on both Windows and Macs, we've done some work to make them accessible for users with disabilities. We look forward to working with the University's new Web Accessibility and Adaptive Technology Coordinator as well as with users with disabilities to optimize the site further.
We're big fans of website usability and user experience, and though we've not had resources to do formal testing on this round of the site, we're very interested in anecdotal input. So try the site out for a few days (to get over your initial gut reaction) and then let us know:
Thanks very much for your interest, and Go Blue!
General Computing | Contact Us | Computing on Campus | Wolverine Access | University of Michigan
October 12, 2009