We were concluding a recent dinner of Chinese takeout. Tasty, satisfying. And now it was fortune cookie time. The best part! I opened up my cookie: “Joy comes from adventure today. Time to shake the world up.”
Ooohh. Exciting. Lost in thought; contemplating all the adventures I would be engaging in over the next couple of weeks, months. None. That’s OK. Help myself to second cookie.
I kid you not—this was the fortune inside my second cookie: “Joy comes from peace today, save the adventure until next week.” Frown. What does this mean? Now, here’s the work part.
This is exactly the dilemma the Web team encounters every time we embark on a redesign. How? Well, there’s the pull to do something new—adventure calls!—and an equal and opposite pull to keep things pretty much the same, or worse, to model something done elsewhere. I think we would all agree that with this rework of the main site the team has spent lots of energy pursuing and embracing change. Rest assured, this change is all based on our user research, so we feel confident that the refreshed site will be relevant, easy to use, and all that good stuff we care so much about. But it will also be different. But how, exactly?
Different in that this time around we’re empowered to really apply all of our user research. Yes, we’ll really change the language that we’ve always used that prospective students still don’t understand; yes, we’ll do away with those link lists everyone needs to be a part of but don’t do much; yes, we’ll skip that placeholder copy that doesn’t inform, invite, or entice you in to the site further; yes, we’ll do much more to leverage our community tools. I could go on, but I would love to hear from you. What should we do away with that we think we can’t do away with?
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