The purpose of the UB Graduate School website redesign project was to create a single unified Graduate School web presence that increased the Graduate School's visibility at the University at Buffalo and in the Higher Education community as a whole. This site was designed and developed following user-centered methodologies to best meet the user needs for both visitors and staff, creating a more usable and efficient experience for all.
In order to determine the ongoing user needs that formed the foundation of this project and ensure that the end product was usable, continual user testing was employed throughout the design process using subjects from the Graduate School's main target audiences: prospective students, current students and faculty and staff.
To streamline the process of redesigning the Graduate School web presence in a user-centered model, a phased approach to Information Architecture was utilized. This process included research, strategy, design, implementation and administration phases. Based upon the data derived from the methodologies and techniques employed throughout the process, the basic underlying architecture was determined and represented through a number of blueprints.
The site was designed using shades of blue and grey, a color scheme matching the University at Buffalo homepage. The graphical fonts used throughout, Frutiger and Minion, match the fonts used in the official UB logo, and all of the students appearing in photos are actual members of the campus community.
The two main sets of navigation, traditional (Home, Academics, Admissions, Costs & Finances, Research, Student Life) and audience based (Prospective Students, Incoming Students, Current Students, Faculty & Staff), are located at the top of each page, along with the global site search. Additional tools and information (Legal Notices, Accessibility Statement, Contact Us, Graduate School A - Z) are located along the footer of each page. Contextual navigation is available throughout the site, and breadcrumbs links are featured on all pages outside of the homepage.
The homepage and most main sections utilize a two column design with a featured student photo. "Traditional" content appears in paragraphs in the left column, with a number of contextual links to pertinent items of interest. The right column features quick links with brief descriptions to help aid users in finding the content they are seeking. Since many of the lower level pages contain a lot of textual information, these pages were formatted into a single column layout with no header photos to optimize space.
The site prototype was created using the World Wide Web Consortium's standards of XHTML for structure, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for presentation. This approach to development allows the site to degrade gracefully across media, so that users of text browsers, screen readers, cell phones, and older browsers would still have the ability to access all of the site information.
Different stylesheets were created and implemented for screens, handheld devices, and printers. Screen stylesheets contained all main graphical elements, including images for the navigation, main photos and graphical banners. Handheld stylesheets simply featured formatting for text, while print stylesheets formatted text and removed navigational elements.
To make sure that the site was usable and accessible to a wide variety of users, the site prototype was tested on a number of Mac and PC browsers. On a Mac, the prototype was viewed and deemed usable on Camino (0.8.2), Firefox (1.0.1), Internet Explorer (5.2), and Safari (1.3). On a PC the prototype was tested and deemed usable on Elinks (0.10.5), Firefox (1.0.4, 1.0.6), Internet Explorer (5.0, 5.5, 6.0), Mozilla (1.7b), Netscape (4.0, 6.2, 7.0), and Opera (7.54u2).
Each page on the site was tested with the W3C XHTML and CSS validation tools, and passed. To further ensure that users with disabilities would be able to properly use the site, the new Graduate School website also conforms to Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and Section 508 guidelines.