Rebuilding Our EDU Site, Part 10: Design
Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
Have you ever been responsible for convincing a mechanic to trust you about cars? For convincing a Michelin-star chef to trust you about what should be on her menu? What about convincing esteemed artists and designers to trust you to make decisions about the design of their college’s website?
Everyone’s an Expert
In the case of rebuilding MICA’s website, everyone really is an expert. As one of the top colleges of art and design in the U.S. and world, MICA employs highly accomplished artists and designers as faculty to train the next generations of successful artists and designers, and one key part of the curriculum in design and art programs is critique. The students share their work and their professors and peers critique that work.
Of all the phases of this project, the prospect of presenting, advocating for, and socializing the campus on the design phase caused me the most anxiety. I envisioned heated design presentations with faculty giving scathing critique and pixel-specific recommendations.
What Kind of College Are We?
The design phase for our project followed the strategic phase, during which our vendor, Fastspot, created and revised a Creative Brief. This document was created to be “a guide for the development of all visual and organizational elements within the new website.”
Working from the Creative Brief, our vendor created and presented two different design directions for the project: one was contemporary, familiar—you could tell immediately how to use it; the second direction was innovative and unlike anything we had seen before.
The moment I saw this second concept, I knew it was the direction in which I wanted to go. At that moment, had there been a prayer candle to honor St. Yesenia or St. Ethan or St. Jeffrey to move the hearts of the project stakeholders and my colleagues to prefer this concept, too, I would have lit it immediately.
Fortunately, there was no need for fire.
All the Presentations
The members of the project core team were all as excited about the more unconventional concept as I was. But we still needed to present it to key stakeholders for their input and to the College’s president for approval.
With the universal support we received for rebuilding our website came an attention and desire to be involved in high-level decisions. The president, provost, vice president of admission and financial aid were all included in the sign-off process for design. The president wanted an innovative website that stood apart from the sites of our competition; the provost wanted a site that functioned well and was easy to navigate; the VP of admission wanted a site whose content focused heavily on our primary audience: prospective students. Each has different design aesthetics.
We knew the key to winning over the provost and VP of admission was to first win over the president. So, we had our vendor present to him first. Like the project core team, he was immediately drawn to the non-conventional design option. With his support, we then presented to the provost and vice president of admission. The provost liked elements of each concept and may have preferred the more conventional option, but shared that he felt the second option could be very promising if it took a few cues from option 1, including adding more white space around content. An uncontroversial and actionable recommendation.
After presenting to these key stakeholders, our vendor presented to our Web Advisory Committee, a cross-institutional group that includes faculty and staff who are consulted and informed of major decisions affecting our website. The members of this committee overwhelmingly favored the second concept.
Decision
We held a core project team meeting after all presentations had been given and all feedback had been collected to make our final decision, which was made within minutes.
We had collected feedback from all stakeholders who attended presentations using a simple Google Form. We used this feedback to finalize our selection and to also provide initial feedback to Fastspot for continuing to pursue the selected design concept.
I created an approval notice to be signed by the project sponsor and a consolidated feedback document to kickoff initial revisions to the selected design.
Impression Testing
After a quick round of revisions based on our initial feedback, the vendor conducted impression testing with a limited set of key audience members: prospective students and their parents, both domestic and international.
This early design impression testing provided valuable feedback that helped inform the second round of design revisions and a baseline for future impression and usability testing.
Then What?
Development. And…
until two weeks after launch, I didn’t escape the feeling that someone would chime in about the design and derail the entire project.
