Website Usability – and the award goes to…

Last Sunday night the 81st annual Academy Awards took place awarding Oscars to actors, writers, animators and other movie industry people. Personally — I could care less — I didn’t watch a second of it!

On the drive in this morning Phil and I were talking about awards shows and it got me thinking about industry awards — and more specifically website awards. There are lots of websites that are there only to showcase and/or judge other websites. EduStyle.net is a great example. Webmasters post there site designs for the community to critique and users can vote with a thumbs up or thumbs down. EduCheckup.com does video reviews of university websites — here is a review of the current tyndale.ca. Of course there is also the webpagesthatsuck.com awards — don’t want to win that one!

Now if Tyndale were to win an award — what would I want the award for? I do like our design, we have some pretty good copy. Most of our recent photos have been stunning. Our php and html code is clean and correct — what about awards for these? Well those are all fine and good — but the award I would cherish the most wold be an award for usability.

David Beyer of the Academica Group said it best when he said

“In order to make Tyndale’s web presence a success we must understand and follow website best practices and this key guiding principle — websites must answer the needs of the users first.”

We are in the midst of a complete rebuild of the Tyndale website. We have had lots of discussions around lots of topics — but none more important than our users and how they want to use our website. We have examined our information architecture and navigation — how do we make this more understandable to our users? We have looked at how our design templates may help the users find the information they are looking for. We have looked at using language that a user unfamiliar with our context may still understand. We are working on functionality that our users need and want to use.

Of course we are looking to have an attractive design — stimulating copy and photography — clean code — good website manageability… but our primary goal: answer the needs of the users first.

We will be unveiling the new website soon and launching it to the public April 1st. I hope that people on eduStyle.net will give it a thumbs up — but more importantly I hope that our current and future students — our alumni — our donors — our users — give it the thumbs up!

…and the award for website usability goes to…

Note: We have delayed the public launch of the new website for the following reasons:
1. The new public launch date will give us more time to carefully engage the thoughts and concerns of the Tyndale Community. This is especially related to the ongoing discussions concerning the nature of the institution and the proposed marketing language of the website.

2. The new launch time will enable us to have more content ready for the public launch. The various development phases of the website rebuild will not be delayed.

3. We will be able to have dispersed training for content managers to these times: June, September and October.

If you have any questions please let me know.