Web Site Design Committee: February 2, 2000 Minutes

The minutes of the Jan. 19 meeting were approved as submitted.

Neil Erdwien provided a handout, "Audience vs Link Grid" and Bert Biles provided "ITAM Program Website Support for the U.S. Army Environmental Center."

Reports on Action Items:

1. Action: John Murray will write to the "deadletter" Institutes and Centers about the need to establish a web presence. Bill Richter reported that he had asked John Murray about dead links and that John was exploring this issue with the various centers.
2. Action: Neil Erdwein and Janelle Esau will develop a template for a web listing that can be use for a quick response by the Centers and Institutes to establish their web presence. Although Neil and Janelle have not developed the template yet, they did develop the handout Neil distributed at this meeting.
3. Action: Bert Biles will review the Website/URL for Community of Science (COS) and suggest ways to link faculty to our Website for visitors who wish to search for expertise. Bert sent the URL to committee members. It is http://www.cos.com/. Bert suggested that the Provost make it a priority to get faculty listed in the COS database.
4. Action: Gary Rabold will review links to the Technology Transfer/Commercialization sites at other universities to suggest areas for development at K-State. No report.
5. Action: All Members will review some favorite university sites to glean ideas for our revamp-some initial sites; Iowa State, Cornell, Purdue. Gail posted information on our committee Website on web preferences.
6. Action: Committee Members (?) need to talk to the people who are answering questions from the public (e.g., telephone operator/webcontacts) about the types of questions that the public asks concerning the resources at K-State. Don talked with a number of persons to get input. The suggestion is to have a buffer page that would answer questions these individuals get every day.

Vice Provost Beth Unger expressed appreciation to members for serving on the committee. She said the web page must be an external force as well as an internal one. She wants the committee to express and guide how the page should feel. She suggests we set a goal of listing things we want to achieve; audiences we want to reach; information we want them to find available with just one click.

She wants the home page to look clean and be user friendly. She showed us an example of what she is looking for - a leadership page that Neil and Janelle are developing.

Beth said we need:

• a template for building a personal or faculty web page all the way through personalizing the individual's page for a "my K-State" type of experience.
• information structure - how to get from where we are to where we need to be
• look at external audience - group needs to have representatives from student services, continuing education, research

Olivia offered to share a list of audiences gleaned from research done in Human Ecology last year. That list will be scanned and e-mailed to our committee's listserv.

Goal is to have a new web page up by May 1; it will be continually evolving from there. Current web page won an award last year and Beth would like for the next one to win an award as well in the next year or so.

She advocates a home page that keeps track of where the user is in the experience. She urged us to leave the technical part to the professionals - not to worry about the mechanics - but to think of what we want for the ideal. She defined functionality as a way to get the user quickly into a simple home page all the way to evolving into what the user wants it to be. She said that an individual's learning style impacts the way we want to navigate the web. Business people tend to be lateral thinkers. She said Bill Pallett did some preliminary research on this topic, and believes we will get more into that in future years. For now, we know that 60-70 percent of users have a mixed learning style. Still, only 10 percent are text oriented.

The Game plan for Taskforce is to set a goal of having 10 times more information available off the home page than we now have, yet maintain a clean design.

Pat Bosco said he really liked the idea of a page that is both clean and user friendly.

1. Tasks - Identify audiences
2. Audiences - external and internal
3. Set criteria for Website
4. Subcommittees to come up with this information
5. Data gathering and analysis - determine what various audiences are looking for; audience response to various page mock-ups.
6. Mock-ups by Janelle and Neil

Identification of Audiences

1. Balance of internal/external
2. Functionality
3. Feel of page - attractiveness, consistency. Bert said consistency is critical - it's the number one thing he notices on commercial sites. He recommends a style manual.
   1. clean
   2. user friendly
4. Information Richness
5. Load Speed - Neil pointed out that research shows this is the number one criteria for users
6. Organizational Clarity
7. Audience Responsiveness

Olivia pointed out that we need to look at creative ways to help prospective students navigate our site. She said, for example, there are many ways to major in a design profession at K-State. It would be helpful if these were somehow linked so students could research each one. Roger mentioned that Webrings (http://www.webring.com) provide a new way to surf the web, and might be useful within our page structure for career and aptitude-related searching. It would be a good way to give prospective students a variety of information in an easy-to-use way. Janelle mentioned that every user takes a different path.

Cheryl mentioned a web based career aptitude test. Pat suggested it could be as simple a question as "Good at math? Click here."

Members discussed the need to use k-state.edu for the new Website to enhance K-State's marketing efforts.

1. Neil Erdwein explained the tables he had constructed, noting the relevance of K-State's home page buttons (rows) to audience categories (columns).
2. In his comments, Neil mentioned the concept of the "scent" of information, i.e., that one positive attribute of a Website is its promise that the use will find what he/she is seeking by continuing through the site.
3. Linda Johnson's proxy (whose name I did not mark down) said that Linda would be glad to serve on any of the subcommittees.
4. We identified three subcommittees, to report back to us at the Feb. 16 meeting:
   • EXTERNAL AUDIENCE
     Victoria L'Ecuyer
     Melinda Sinn
     Olivia Collins
     
   • INTERNAL AUDIENCE
     Don Crawford
     Roger McHaney
     
   • OTHER (I.E., AUDIENCES THAT EITHER TRANSCEND OR DO NOT OTHERWISE FIT INTO THE INTERNAL/EXTERNAL DICHOTOMY, E.G., SPORTS FANS)
     Bert Biles

Kansas State University
March 7, 2000