When I came up with the concept for eduStyle one of the most important features for me was to have a redesign gallery. In my time working in higher-ed I have been involved in countless small redesigns and a few large institutional ones. Some successful and some not so successful. At most times we’re either preparing for a redesign, launching a redesign or planning for the next redesign. Many times they are years in the making and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other times they are done in months and with little cost. But often they are a complete waste of time and money. They are redesigns for redesign’s sake. They kept us busy, but the result was a jarring and disruptive experience for the users and minimal actual improvement to the websites. It didn’t take long for me to spot opportunities to minimize the impact on users, save money and be more nimble and responsive with the websites that I maintained. Here is where incremental redesigns come in.

Incremental Redesign

Incremental redesign is just how it sounds, you incrementally improve the website one piece at a time. Now I want to make it clear, I’m not saying all redesigns are bad … just some. There are clearly cases where you need to bring out the demolition crew. But the old model of “tear down, rebuild and walk away” is wrong. Occasionally you need to tear down and rebuild, but you should never walk away. If you embrace the model of incremental redesign, you are constantly looking for ways to improve the user experience on your websites. You are watching stats, conducting testing, listening to feedback, reading books (shameless plug), reading articles and looking at other good examples of websites (second shameless plug). And when you find something to tweak you tweak it. You might even skip the committee, by pass your non-webdesigner boss and just fix it. It is easier to ask for forgiveness anyway right? But you shouldn’t need to because they probably won’t even notice PLUS you have research to back up the improvement you have made. And if they do notice you can say “oh yeah, we were watching the stats and there was a problem there so we fixed that a while back. The response has been good … now about that raise.” And If you do feel the need to go through the committee or the boss, bring your research and sell it like you are the expert that you are.

So here is my proposal to you, set aside a few hours a week to tweak. Friday has always been the best day to do it in my experience. You are just waiting for the weekend and you need something to keep you busy. Lets call it Fixup Friday. So here is where we’ll try to help you along the way.

Tweak of the Week

This week I hinted over at .eduGuru that I was working on a new Friday Feature at eduStyle to help promote the concept of incremental redesign. There have been several posts over the last few weeks on the topic and they inspired me to try to make this a reality (How Often Should you Redesign?, Don’t Redesign Your Website, Web Redesign on a Dime, Redesign Once, Increment Forever). With the redesign gallery here at eduStyle it is easy for us to bring attention to great redesigns, but it has been almost impossible to highlight the incremental fixes that are going on all the time. So what we’re going to do here is showcase a tweak of the week. I’ll warn you up front, this will probably not be a weekly feature and in most cases it will be short (maybe a paragraph plus screenshots). More likely it will be bi-weekly or monthly, but a lot of that depends on your letting us know about some of the stuff you’re fixing. Tweak of the Week will be rotated with our other Friday Features (some we’ll be reviving and some other new ones we’ll be launching in the coming weeks). So without futher ado here is our first Tweak of the Week.

Tweak of the Week: Spring Arbor University

This tweak was based on feedback received from the users of eduStyle. When Spring Arbor’s site was submitted to eduStyle there were several concerns expressed about the content area of the website. The main content area was faded by default, as a user moused over the content the fade went away and the content was raised to full contrast. msteciuk said:

“This is well done, but I question the decision to fade content by default. The assumption seems to be that people skim with their mouse… but do we have good reason for believing this is true?”

Kelly Skarritt from Spring Arbor contact me to let me know that based on the feedback here they had made some changes to the website. The result is a much more usuable site. The increased contrast will aide low vision users, who may have missed the content all together. It also removes a confusing and unnecessary interaction from the website. Kudos go to the folks at Spring Arbor for hearing the feedback and taking it as an opportunity to improve the website.

Now is your turn

Have you made an incremental improvement to your website? Altered the font size? Increased contrast? Redesigned an element on the page? We’d like to hear about it. Send us some information about what you did, what motivated it and include a before and after screenshot. Email your tweaks to friday at edustyle dot net

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Looking for ways to improve your website? You might find some ideas in our book The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design or you could get a private review of your website from the authors of the book.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 11:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.