Focusing the Conversation

[rcrisler1]

In the interest of focusing our conversation for the 2009 redesign, we are today releasing the results of last Tuesday's WDN survey on initial candidate designs.

There was a significant delta in the results between the designs ranked seventh and eighth, so we propose that this set of seven designs form the core of the redesign discussion going forward.

The agenda of the next WDN meeting, scheduled for Nov. 12, would be formed around presentations on each of these candidate designs, by their designers. Because there are many good ideas -- of both aesthetic and functional value -- in all designs that were contributed, there would be time after the invited presentations for any member of WDN to present the design or interface elements that they feel strongly about, to make a case for inclusion in any final design.

Whether or not your design is one that ranked among those top seven, or not, or whether you submitted a design at all, please stay in the conversation as we continue to improve the UNL website.

Thank you.

[smeranda]

For review of all design candidates submitted, the presentation from the October 21 meeting has been uploaded:

http://www.unl.edu/webdevnet/downloads/20081021DesignCandidates.pdf

In addition, each vote for the first impression and the Likert scale questions were analyzed and counted. The results can be found at:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pA92lR_oKGg4QVDZyaMSCJg

Each of the seven design candidates are in individual threads in order to allow for comments and discussion related to the design as a whole, particular visual elements, and/or particular functional elements. The original designer is encouraged to participate in the conversation to explore his/her thoughts.

The individual threads are:

Design 7
Design 9
Design 11
Design 14
Design 15
Design 17
Design 18

[JNothwehr]

I couldn't help but notice that 6 out of the top 7 designs implemented a fairly standard left side navigation. Are there accessibility/compliance issues with expandable or pullout menu navigation?

[rcrisler1]

Well, the menu options need to be present in the HTML. Anything that requires Javascript to deliver menu options is pretty much out of the question. That doesn't mean that we can't use Javascript to provide a higher degree of user interaction, though.

I noticed that as well with the left-side nav. There's one out of the seven, as you note, that puts all nav in a block above the maincontent area. When I think about our current design, I count at least five blocks of navigation, plus search and quick links. There's probably an opportunity there.