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Focus
Reading Between the Lines
9/29/2004
2 - For/About.
With drop-down menus, a lot of navigational options are compressed into a small space, but they’re still uncluttered and easy to grasp. That’s because the Web site captures the two main ways that the information on a site can be organized: by who the visitor is (alumnus, prospective student, faculty, etc.), or by what topic the visitor is interested in (“About”). The “About” topics have drop-down menus that are activated by mouse roll-over, providing an easy way to glimpse the next level of info available. Visitors don’t have to click down and then back up to see what comes next.
3 - myRIT.
myRIT opens the door to a vast array of information available to insiders such as current students, faculty, and staff. Students can check grades and register for classes, powered by the campus information system. For fun and general information, the Rochester weather forecast and live views from the RIT Web Cam invite visitors to check out the weather for themselves, and site navigators can also view a calendar of goings-on—even a dictionary word-of-the-day. (A recent example: “Flaneur: loafer.”)4 - Guest View.
The “Guest View” button lets non-community visitors wander through non-confidential parts of the portal system and get a taste of what the campus has to offer. (Many portal-equipped systems lack this courtesy to visitors—or keep it tucked away.) RIT provides more powerful portal accounts to prospective students and alumni.
5 - Campus Directory.
Ever been frustrated wandering around a school’s site trying to find out how to contact somebody? Directory look-up information is so basic that it ought to be found right at the top level—and it is at RIT. If your institution has a policy against publishing such information on the Web, consider telling a visitor that fact before he wastes time scouting around. Then suggest other means your visitors can use to contact people at your institution; a general number, at the very least.
6 - Flash Slide Show.
(Live rotation.) Yes, flash animations are controversial—so much so that some users install software that disables Flash on every site they visit. RIT came up with an effective compromise, however. This central illustration d'es dissolve into a running slide show while the page is viewed. But far from being just generic campus-brochure photography, each shot nails a specific personality trait of RIT, and text is matched with the image to further illustrate the point. What’s more, the Flash graphics are well-behaved; they stay within a frame and don’t scoot distractingly around the page. Most importantly, the information in the Flash slide show, while complementary to the page, is not essential for navigation. And RIT provides a button that lets visitors turn the animation off with a single click.
John Savarese is a consulting principal with Edutech International.
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