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Stanford Website Redesign Coming June’08
By Reshma Kumar at March 26, 2008 3 Comments
Stanford University is working on the redesign of their website. The project which started last Nov 15 will take 7 months with an expected launch date of June 15 ‘08. Codenamed “Project 8180″ which refers to the total acreage of the Stanford campus, the redesign will be the third of the site since its inception. The site has not undergone a redesign in about 5 years.
The goals of the redesign are to create a more consistent and updated look and feel across Stanford sites, focus the global navigation by decreasing the number of menu items from 8 to 5, to surface and provide a more holistic view of what the university has to offer, and to better market it. What is interesting to note are the following:
-the page has a lot more content
-it is now more of a portal or gateway page
-front and foremost use of rich media i.e. videos (very web 2.0-esque)
-use of lots of imagery
-timely and current news section
-multiple rss feed subscriptions (very web 2.0-esque)
-jump links to the most popular content areas
-what looks like in-page quick links versus a link to another page (very web 2.0-esque)
-events calendars
-scrollable in-page view of other stanford sites (very web 2.0-esque)
-international program section surfaced
MOCKUP OF REDESIGN:
Labels: usability 2.0, user experience, web 2.0
3 Comments
I wonder what the metric for “success” will be in this project? I really like the Simplest models for redesign where you only change things because you can show that changing them will really improve things.
Good question. A lot of times redesigns are a reflection of a change in goals, or feedback that the current site isn’t working, or because a look and feel is dated. A lot of times it’s a combination of all of these. The first and last are harder to measure but if something is changed because it doesn’t work, that’s more easily validated.
As with Joseph, I am also curious to know how the Stanford design team is approaching measurement. I wonder if they are planning any A/B or multivariate testing as part of the rollout?
SFGate recently launched its biggest site redesign since 2002. I blogged about it here:
http://june.typepad.com/june/2008/02/the-evolution-o.html