City University Case Study: A Usable Course Finder
Last week, Squiz UK held a seminar in London which included a number of case study presentations showcasing successful Web Experience Management solutions. Daniel Jackson, Development Manager at City University, presented a case study of their recent web project to redesign and rebuild the university's two corporate websites and create a new intranet for staff and students. This huge undertaking incorporated a new CMS (Squiz Matrix), new servers, new network, new content, new IA, new design, new business processes... and a new search engine - Funnelback Search.
Dan's talk took us through the project process from inception to completion and delivered a lot of useful information and advice along the way. He also showcased their course finder - a powerful tool, powered by Funnelback Search, which makes their course information easy to access and navigate. Here is a summary of the key points of Dan's presentation, followed by the presentation slides.
Context
All UK universities are facing growing pressures in light of tuition fee increases and budget cuts which mean they need to have high-performing, cost-effective websites to help recruit students. City University's redesign project targeted their two main corporate sites (www.city.ac.uk and www.cass.ac.uk) as well as the university's intranet - a huge undertaking which took a total of 15 months. The university has a highly skilled web team with a wealth of technical and development talents, so they did most of the work in-house allowing them to take complete ownership of the project.
Domain Driven Design and the Importance of the Course Finder
The web team were heavily inspired by two talks at the Institutional Web Management Workshop event in 2009; a BBC presentation focusing on Domain Driven Design and a 'rant' about the state of university course finders by Paul Boag - a well respected usability evangelist.
The concept of domain driven design shaped the development of the project towards focusing on the central aspects of the university's business - such as courses, academics and research - which needed to be represented via the website. This helped them to determine the 'Atomic Element' of their site: The Course. Course information is the most fundamental contributing factor to the website's success, so it had to be prominent, easy to find and easy to navigate through.
Making a Course Finder That Doesn't Suck
As Paul Boag put it: "...course finders are typically slow and page based. The user is forced to navigate a series of link intensive and text heavy pages, before finding information on a single course. There is no ability to compare courses, filter results or receive course suggestions." (via).
To create a usable and navigable course finder, Daniel and the team created a single screen web application and selected Funnelback Search to power auto-suggestions, information retrieval and faceted filtering of course data. The design was kept as simple as possible - stripping away all extraneous copy to leave a free text search field for the user to search by keyword(s). Auto-suggestions help the user to enter relevant terms and speeds their route to the information they're looking for, while faceted navigation allows them to filter through the results by various categories.
Analytics and heatmaps have shown that the course finder has been a success and that the keyword search and faceting are both heavily used. Qualitative feedback has also been very positive. Daniel added, "We love Funnelback! It's an incredibly powerful tool and although we've done some very cool things with it, we feel that we've barely touched the surface."
