Rationale Paper
Our redesign of the Rowan IT website started out by reviewing the website to see what we did and didn't like about the site. We notice that there was a lot of duplication of information. We did a site map of what the site looked lik and the we proceeded to reoranize the links and information so that vistors coudl find what they needed easily and quickly. As with writing any paper, defining the audience is an important step in the process of how the paper will proceed and how successful you are in getting your information communicated to achieve a goal. With our audience in mind, we wanted to streamline the site and organize the information in a way that it could be easily navigated by current students, future students, faculty and anyone else in the Rowan community. One of the questions posed by Goto and Cotler is What is the primary action the site visitor should take when coming to your site? Pg 44 Our visitors to the Rowan site would be searching for information in order to move on to their next task. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for visitors to navigate and find what they need so that they could complete their goals.
For better usability, the navigation bar was moved to the top of the page and the number of links was decreased. Goto and Colter talk about chunking and organizing on page 94. We used their philosophy and broke down all of the information that was included on the site. We physically spread out our information on the floor and grouped it together by similar items. Within this process we were able to eliminate duplications and streamline the site to include the necessary information. We went from thirteen links down to eight and reorganized the content within the links. By reorganizing the content into a fewer number of links, we tried to decrease the number of links the site visitor would have to click on to get to the information they needed. We did not change the content of the site. All of the information that was provided in the original website is still accessible.
Earlier in the semester we looked at other college IT sites to see how they were set up and compare them to our own. By doing this, we were able to incorporate the things we liked into our own site. We noticed that many of the sites had mission statements on their websites. In the mission statement, the web designers outlined the purpose of the site. It made it clear to visitors that the web designers wanted to create a site that would provide the information the visitor was looking for. As a result, we decided to add our own mission statement to the front of the webpage.
Accessibility was also considered during the site redesign. The colors are simple and we used a standard 12 Pt Font. Chapter 7 of Nielsen and Lorangers Prioritizing Web Usability is dedicated to the readability and legibility of the text of a website. Their top guidelines on page 215 were to use common fonts sized at or above 10 points, avoid busy backgrounds, use black text on white backgrounds, and keep moving, all cap, and graphical text to a minimum. By using these guidelines, our website is easy to navigate and the visitors to the site can actually read the information they are looking for. It is especially important for an IT website to be easy to read. People are going there to get advice or instructions so that they can move along with their projects.
Overall, our goal was to reorganize the Rowan IT website for easier navigation leading to better usability. The site was already filled with helpful information for the Rowan Community. However, it was duplicated and not organized well. We wanted to create a site that visitors felt was easy to use and would aide them in completing their projects. We hope that we were able to redesign the Rowan website in such a way that people would be able to use it effectively.
Our Redesign of the Toolbox Website