Taking Teaching Further

Don’t Make Me Think

Originally uploaded by Jason 2.0.
I just finished this book this afternoon. Wow. I’m a slow reader, so it took me a bit of time to consume this. I brought it with me to Refresh Orlando, so obviously this got put on the fast track. For good reason.

We’ve done usability testing this summer on the current Web site as we attended Jeff Veen’s Usability seminar about two years ago. Joel and I pushed hard and took time to test students the right way. We did focus groups for parents, accelerated degree completion students and graduate students. We published the findings in a comprehensive doc for the VPs and President Beebe. The testing really helped us think strategically about how we would design the new arbor.edu. I’ll publish the doc sometime soon.

What Don’t Make Me Think did was confirm many things we are already putting in process, but also help us really get down to the nitty-gritty on what we’re trying to accomplish. There were tons of things that I could pull out of this, but one key statement was regarding the home page. Krug says:

“As quickly and clearly as possible, the Home page needs to answer the four questions I have in my head when I enter a new site for the first time:

1. What is this?
2. What do they have here?
3. What can I do here?
4. Why should I be here — and not somewhere else?

I need to be able to answer these questions at a glance, correctly and unambiguously with very little effort.”

I believe that’s where we’re headed. He used an exercise that I believe Cameron Moll did in his presentation at Refresh Orlando with squinting at the home page. If you can blur the page and still make out what the basic story is, what it’s about, or where the main sections are, you’ve succeeded. If we value everything and focus on nothing, we’ve lost.

Judging from some preliminary design and IA, I think we’re on the right path. Especially after listening to our audience. I think we’re going to try and do some preliminary usability testing with some of our preliminary PSDs when they are generated to get impressions and feedback. Before we walk down roads too far and too long. Let’s do things right.