How do you like the UChicago website?

calmom
Mon, 25 Sep 2006 23:51:33 +0000

Libby, I am a parent, not a student - but I also happen to be a web designer and I spent plenty of time last year on the Chicago site. Quite frankly I found it frustrating and hard to navigate. It’s hard for me now to remember specific areas where I had problems, but I think one issue is that you have to click repeatedly to get at information; and the other thing is that the clicks keep taking you to new areas with a different look or feel - so there is no consistent navigational array.

Here’s an example – suppose I want to find out what foreign language majors are offered at Chicago. From the home page, I click departments and schools. By “Humanities” I see that there is a “List of Departments” – great! – but then a list pops up that does not have any clickable links – so I’ve got a list but I can’t use the list to navigate, and as soon as I go back to the main page the list loses focus so it disappears behind everything else on my desktop. So then it is 2 other clicks to get to a page with a list of hot links – why couldn’t the first list have links in it?

Anyway, the site is full of dead ends like that. So I think that the first thing the site needs is a consistent and informative navigational array, and a theme in terms of layout that is carried throughout the site.

One rule I follow for the sites I design is that everything on the site should be no more than 3 mouse clicks away – if it takes more than that to find something,then there should be direct links higher in the navigational array.