Congrats to New City Media
December 3rd, 2005
A big tip of the hat to David Poteet and all the smart folks at New City Media for winning the contract to redesign Virginia Tech’s web site.
We’ve long been fans of the work of NCM, most recently impressed with their nicely executed design for National Geographic’s Wildcam Africa, where you can spend hours watching African wildlife gather through a web cam at Pete’s Pond, a watering hole in the Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana.
Unlike many design firms, NCM is extremely user centered in their approach, always focusing on delivering the right experience for the users while meeting the business needs of their clients. They are proof that you can building an agency that can produce snappy creative without compromising the user experience quality. We’ve learned a lot from their approach.
University web sites are a huge challenge and, of all the people we know, we don’t think Virginia Tech could’ve made a better choice.
Congrats and good luck on the project…
December 3rd, 2005 at 10:17 pm
Thanks for posting this. I had not heard of New City Design and look forward to seeing what they can do for Va Tech. I looked through their portfolio and consider the work they did on the Ratford Athletics site to be very nice.
You wrote “University web sites are a huge challenge …”
I couldn’t agree more, very diverse audience for one. Can you elaborate a some more and tell us why you think they are “a huge challenge”?
December 5th, 2005 at 2:07 pm
They’re a challenge certainly because of the size, but a bigger issue is the way universities tend to be organized. I liken them to a feudal system – a loosely organized group of powerful fiefdoms (colleges, departments, centers etc.) with allegiance to an overlord. You can’t just dictate new standards from on high. Also, so many areas of the site end up getting built or maintained by students or other temporary personnel, so it’s hard to maintain consistency or retain knowledge gained.
I asked Jared for his advice and thoughts on the project a couple of weeks ago, and here is a summary of what he said:
– begin summary of Jared Spool’s comments –
At most universities, the people contributing to the web site are scattered and detached from each other. They have varying skills, and no centralized mechanism for growing those skills.
Solving these issues is really about communicating and building confidence.
Schools that are starting to get their act together are taking some of these steps:
• identify the people who contribute to your site
• have regular meetings, get people talking and sharing issues
• regular training opportunities
• provide forums (online or offline)
other ideas that schools are just starting to do include:
• developing pattern libraries instead of just style guides (see the article about how Yahoo! is using pattern libraries)
• providing resources for user-centered design and user testing
• library of personas, including examples of how different groups are using them.
• buddy system, wherein each developer has a “buddy” in another dept. who will facilitate user tests for him/her, and vice versa.
In any community you have lurkers, contributors, and avid contributors. If we develop tools to support the community, they need to encourage the avid contributors while still allowing the lurkers to easily take advantage of them.
Ultimately, you want to make it so that good design is the path of least resistance. You also want to make it so that it’s easier to build on what others have done successfully than to be completely innovative. Innovation is good, but many schools suffer from a little too much maverick innovation on the web.
Most schools are really just getting off the ground. They’re only starting to wake up and realize how many different audiences they are serving, and how varied the needs of those audiences are.
– end summary of Jared’s comments –