Libby Peterek
libby@ischool.utexas.edu
LIS 385T
A Critique of the University of Texas at Austin Home Page
Assignment due: October 29, 2002
Assignment submitted: October 29, 2002
A Critique of the University of Texas at Austin Home Page
Table of Contents
Original UT Home Page Know Your Audience Content Navigation Links Labels
Additional Redesign Proposals UT Home Page Redesign References
The University of Texas at Austin (UT) ranks as the largest public university in the United States. In turn, its website must accommodate many users, completing many tasks, within a wide information base. The daily activities of current students, faculty, and staff depend on home page ease of use. Additionally, the existence of UT relies on continued interest on the part of prospective students, faculty, and staff. This heightens the importance of effective information architecture throughout the site and, more importantly, on the home page as that is the first impression current and future users have of UT. After conducting a rudimentary user task analysis survey, it was clear that the main users of the site (students, faculty, and staff at UT) had to pass through several, often confusing, links before arriving at their intended destination. This information combined with my own futile efforts to navigate the site with ease prompted me to choose this site for redesign.
Original screen shot retreived on October 24, 2002, from http://www.utexas.edu
"A gulf between a design team and the end customers is a fundamental problem inherent in web design" (Van Duyne, Landay, & Hong, 2003, p. 31). A home page should be explicit with regards to its intended audience. However, this principle is not adhered to in the case of UT's home page. Although the navigation bars include information about academia, the main content of the page is overrun by University of Texas (UT) news, updated every two weeks. The goal of the site should be informational - for both current students, faculty, and staff, and prospective students, faculty, and staff. It should be a venue to ease communication and information retrieval. And all of this should be blatantly clear at a glance.
The reasons for this oversight may be due to many factors: UT is trying to accommodate all possible visitors by making their home page information rich; the audience was overlooked in the attempt to update the older site; or the audience was not consulted during redesign. Whatever the case, the home page would benefit greatly keeping the users needs in mind. "Knowing your current and prospective customers will help you choose patterns that are relevant to your site design, as well as help you decide between competing trade-offs when you are customizing patterns for your design situation" (Van Duyne, Landay, & Hong, 2003, p. 31).
The UT home page tries to achieve too much in the form of content. The navigation bars provide the user every possible choice in the site on the first page, when it would be more prudent to give these options on the next level of navigation. The left navigation bar alone offers 15 choices, each with a drop down menu, making the grad total 74 links off of the left navigation bar. The user looking to complete a quick and easy task may become frustrated by too many choices. Additionally, so many options raise the likelihood of a user choosing the wrong heading. Once the user has chosen the correct path from a few choices, the information presented to him/her can expand. Few effectively labeled and linked headings on the home page provide the user with a clearer understanding of his/her choices and the over-all site content.
Where the navigation over shoots its target, the body of the home page undershoots it. The content, in the form of "News", "Inside UT", and "Spotlights", does little for the task-oriented academic institution. It may keep the campus community up-to-date on various gifts to the university, but it does not help the Ph.D. candidate searching for administrative forms. After all, the audience must be remembered. UT's home page could benefit by placing some of the navigation bar content within the body of the page.
In describing "Why Everybody Designs Websites Incorrectly", Nielsen highlights information architecture, "[Many] structure the site to mirror the way the company is structured. Instead, the site should be structured to mirror the user's tasks and their views of information space" (Nielsen, 2000, p.15). Navigation bars provide the user a structured interface to the paths throughout a site. UT's site navigation does not make use of global and local navigation bars (typically top and left, respectively). Instead, the home page is a forum entirely based on global navigation, making it difficult to browse. The top navigation bar consists of two navigation bars, one represented by white text on a gray bar (see figure 2) and the other by smaller gray text that turns orange when rolled-over (see figure 2a). Based on labeling and user tasks, the white text navigation fits closer to the users' needs. However, clicking-through to the next level of pages shows that the white text navigation becomes page titles and is no longer linked to anything. The smaller gray text navigation bar also ranks high with respect to users' tasks, but its small font size does not lend itself to such an easy conclusion.
Figure 2 
Figure 2a 
Additionally, the left navigation bar is listed alphabetically, disregarding
hierarchy, task importance, and user behavior. Similarly, the site map
does little to represent main page organization or the various pathways
a user might take through the UT site; instead it lists every link in
the site alphabetically on a long page with no anchors. This may be a
labeling problem, in which case a simple word swap from "map"
to "index" would suffice.
UT's home page has trouble establishing continuity amongst its links (be it text or graphics). The lower top and left navigation bars use roll-over text and underlining to establish links. But, the upper top navigation bar, headings, and images use neither. The mouse cursor transforming to a pointed finger is the best clue that these are click-able features. However, the "pointed finger" cursor cannot always be trusted either, as it points to the longhorn graphic splitting the left navigation bar, but this image is linked to nothing.
UT has made use of "the TITLE attribute with text links" in the upper top navigation bar, headings, and images (Van Duyne, Landay, & Hong, 2003, p. 583). This feature aids site accessibility and should be spread throughout the roll-over, underlined links as well.
"Information architects must try their best to design labels that speak the same language as a site's users while reflecting its content" (Rosenfeld & Morville, 2002, p. 77). Labels, especially when used for navigation, should allow for natural mapping. The UT home page uses many labels on its information rich home page. Unfortunately, many have similar meanings, making them relatively indistinguishable from one another. A prospective graduate student can go to the "Graduate Studies" link or the "Prospective Student" link. Both of these pages offer a link for information on applying to UT. But, they take the user to two different destinations. This is not just a labeling problem, but a site architecture problem as well. Still, providing the user with fewer initial choices may help him/her find meaningful information instead of unnecessary clicks.
- The uppermost, white text, navigation bar holds the most value for
user tasks. So, the white text navigation bar will move to the left.
- In place of the white text, the word "Home" will be
added to give the user a sense of placement within the site.
- In place of the white text, the word "Home" will be
added to give the user a sense of placement within the site.
- The left navigation bar uses poor labeling and confuses the user.
- Most of the information contained in the left navigation bar could
be displayed as a subheading under "Prospective Students",
"Current Students", " Faculty", "Staff",
"Alumni & Friends", "Parent's & Visitors"
or "About".
- Most of the information contained in the left navigation bar could
be displayed as a subheading under "Prospective Students",
"Current Students", " Faculty", "Staff",
"Alumni & Friends", "Parent's & Visitors"
or "About".
- The text size is too small, especially on the navigation bars. An
option to increase and decrease the font should be added.
- A text-only viewing option should be added for accessibility and differences
in browsing and searching techniques.
- Icons (with limited text beneath) should be added for direct links
to the UT Library site, UT Webmail, the daily Texan, the Longhorn football
site (to change with the season and sport), and the UT Directory.
- The search tools can be pared down to the box reading, "Search UT Austin powered by Google" and "other search tools" since "popular search terms" is covered by it.
Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability. Indianapolis: New Riders Publishing.
Rosenfeld, L. & Morville, P. (2002). Information architecture for the world wide web. California: O'Reilly & Assoc.
Van Duyne, D. K., Landay, J. A., & Hong, J. I. (2003). The design
of sites. Boston: Addison
Wesley.