Copyright 1996 Yale University. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 19, Number 3, Fall 1996, pp. 49-51. This article is adapted from "Spinning the Web: The Design of Yale's Front Door," first published in the April 1996 edition of Omnibus: Computing at Yale (http://www.yale.edu/omnibus).

Spinning the Web:
The Design of Yale's Front Door

As time passes, the term "the Web" proves to be remarkably prescient nomenclature. The World Wide Web has infiltrated and entangled our lives much like its natural namesake. More noteworthy, however, is the way the Web has mimicked biological processes, showing the ability to metamorphose and evolve in a manner that would make Darwin proud. As the Web changes, the pages and people who are stuck to its digital threads must also evolve, or face the fate of those not "naturally selected."

The story that follows will resonate with many readers. The same scenarios are currently present across campuses all over the world. Redesigning a college or university home page is both necessary and challenging--necessary because an epoch on the Web is six months, and stasis for much longer ensures that technological and design innovations have passed you by; and challenging because design choices are not science. Building consensus around one choice, especially at institutions that pride themselves on freedom of thought, is an unenviable task.¹

Early Efforts At Yale

By 1994, the world was markedly different. The early adopters had been joined by mainstream users, and recognition of the Web, both on and off campus, had grown dramatically. Academic Computing Services (ACS), fine purveyors of the Gopher-based campus information system since the early 1990s, realized that the Web was a mature information dissemination tool. The Front Door represented all of Yale, and required substantial managerial and technical attention. The Web was now a major responsibility, and it was time to move that responsibility to an institutional home. Day-to-day operations of the Front Door were transferred to ACS.

At the same time that ACS assumed custody of the Front Door, the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) became increasingly concerned about the Web's public relations implications. The director of OPA convened a design group, and shepherded the creation of a new image ("the books") to be the main graphical statement of the Front Door.² The new image was grafted onto the pre-existing organizational structure, and the resulting Front Door served the University's needs through 1994.

By early 1995, however, the organizational schema of that original Front Door, basically unchanged since 1993, was showing signs of wear. The arts of managing information, creating categories, and identifying audiences had matured along with the Web. Adding new links to the Front Door in an ad hoc manner quickly created a rambling litany of resources that daunted newcomers and created a skewed perception of the University's offerings.

The maturation of information organization mirrored a greater appreciation of the Web's importance by University officers. Through frequent use and conversations with sister institutions, Yale's governance now understood that the Web was a new form of publication, the impact of which on the school's image was equal to, if not greater than, standard paper fare.³ As such, any redesign of the Front Door needed University-wide approval. That approval would come straight from the top: the president.

In only two years, the Front Door had evolved from the exploratory musings of the technically enabled to an image- bearing tool that required the imprimatur of the chief executive officer. To garner that imprimatur in an effective manner brought other challenges, however.

Building Consensus For A New Design

The advisory team included members of the larger University community, including representatives from the Provost's Office, the University Library, Computing and Information Systems (C&IS, the University computing organization), the Office of Public Affairs, the faculty, and the president's designee.⁴ The design team included a graphic designer, along with two members of the library staff, the de facto University Webmaster, and the Director of Academic Computing, who convened and led both teams. The two teams met in tandem to discuss goals and concepts for the new Front Door. Then the design team would actualize those concepts. The two teams would come together again to discuss the design team's progress, and the cycle would continue. The new Front Door was born out of this iterative process.

The teams first identified a set of principles to guide the design process.

• The page should be small and compact, accessible in total via one mouse click (on a "standard" browser the image would take up the first screen, and a single click would scroll the text into view).

• The page should be designed primarily for visitors.⁵

• The page should be universally accessible, which meant that minimal browser-specific HTML would be used.

• The page should have a "statement of purpose," which would make clear for whom and for what the page was designed.

• The page should be distinctive, yet easy to grasp.

Summed together, the overarching goal for the Front Door was to produce appealing and effective access for visitors to Yale. Visitors, however, are a heterogeneous group, each wanting very different resources from the University. Relying on anecdotal and commentary evidence, statistics, and a good dose of common sense, the design team was able to subdivide the Front Door's target audience: scholars (Academics), prospective students (Admissions), former students (Alumni Affairs), and the greater New Haven community (Campus & Community Life).

With the audience defined, the design team went about the work of creating categories for the Front Door. What quickly became apparent is that categories based on existing University divisions (organizational topography) or sectional appeal (e.g., libraries, athletics) were limiting. Organizational topography can be daunting, even for insiders. Sectional appeal leads to the "me too" phenomenon. If one section is allowed on the Front Door, other requests naturally follow, and even if the sectional categories are well conceived, a new sectional division will undoubtedly come into being, wrecking the underlying structure. Eventually, the Front Door will return to the "litany of links" model that the redesign was attempting to banish.

The design team wanted a minimum of categories, clearly defined and organized, that would put each visitor immediately at ease. If you were a prospective student, the design team wanted you to know, at a glance, exactly where to go for admission information. The solution was to use the particular segments of our target audience as category names. Arriving at the Front Door, prospective students would see "Admissions," and there find all the currently available University admission information, as well as links to other resources of interest to applicants. The same would hold true for alumni, and the other targeted categories. Where information crossed boundaries, links were duplicated in each section.

These links would eventually lead a visitor into YaleInfo, the campus information system, where the information actually resided. The Front Door and its appurtenant pages would serve to triage targeted audience members to the information they wanted. For internal users, such a system would be unwieldy and prevent quick access to known resources. The first-time visitor, however, is thankful not to be thrown into the middle of an informational morass.

Such an audience-defined category approach fulfills the vision of the Front Door, offering elegant and effective access for visitors to Yale's electronic resources. The very effectiveness, however, highlights an intrinsic drawback to the system: what about visitors who wish to browse? Academe is littered with stories of scholars who made a critical breakthrough by rifling through a card catalog and following a flight of fancy initiated by random chance. Tight and efficient categories remove the opportunity for intellectual cross-pollination. Because of the varied and rich culture at Yale, the design team wanted a place to highlight interesting resources, without regard to category. The answer was the "Yale Sampler" section, which endeavors to present vignettes of life at the University. The sampler is rotated periodically, to showcase new or changing pages in the community.

A New Front Door--But Not For Long

The Yale advisory and design teams have no illusions concerning the permanence of their work. While it is hoped that the organizational schema chosen will scale well, a life cycle of more than two or three epochs (18 months) is impractical. The Web will evolve further, and so will our understanding of it, so that what now feels visionary will soon look hackneyed.

What will have lasting value, we hope, is the process used to create the schema. Audience targeting, knowing who comes to your pages and why, is invaluable in the design process. So is keeping the design team small. Consensus building and participation from across the University is imperative for both the conceptual phase and the overall acceptance of a new Front Door, but that consensus cannot come at the cost of a bloated design force. With too many hands in the Web, process becomes hopelessly entangled.

The redesign of the Yale Front Door, here presented in a straightforward narrative, belies the difficulty that the design and advisory teams had in creating the new pages. Open discussion and debate, sometimes strenuous and heated, created a crucible that withered many lesser designs. Those that were "naturally selected" from the milieu showed both adaptability and vision, two qualities that will be indispensable for the continuing evolution of the Web. Darwin would indeed be proud.

The author would like to thank Phil Long and Matthew Beacom for their help in making high-quality web pages a reality at Yale.

Sidebar:

Frank Tierney, a graphic designer from Yale University Printing and Graphic Services created "the books. " The image was based on a portion of Elihu Yale's library, part of his original gift to the University. The different sizes and shapes of the original eleven books conspired to form a stunning graphic milieu, not unlike the "Manhattan Skyline, " in the words of Paul Mellon Professor of History of Art, Jules Prown. A distinctive identifier for Yale, "the books" were unlike anything then available on the Web.

While "the books" earned raves from the Internet community, they were subject to intense controversy among students, staff, and alumni. The image was "humanity centric," "scientifically bankrupt, " and "failed to show the beauty of New Haven. " One perturbed alumnus asked why we could not "...have a nice view of the Charles River, like Harvard." He failed to provide relocation funds with his critique.

During the redesign process, both the design and advisory teams spent many sessions discussing changes to "the books." Despite yeoman work by both Mr. Tierney and the team members, in the end, no metaphor could be found that equaled the visual impact of the "Manhattan Skyline." A campus scene, no matter how beautiful, cannot display the academic or cultural richness of Yale. The designers finally compromised on a revamped version of "the books," whose original impact was somewhat dampened by the exigencies of the improved organizational format. The graphical issue has not been laid to rest, however, and even now the teams are planning additional image work in the near future.

Endnotes:

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²See sidebar

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³The value of a publication can be measured in many ways, only one of which is the number of eyes that view it. However, in a straight measure of exposure, Web publications transcend paper. The Yale Front Door main page (http://www.yale.edu) is "hit" over 80,000 times per month, and institutional Web pages account for 1.[2] million transactions in the same time period.

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⁴With hindsight, we would suggest that future advisory teams invite participation from the admissions and alumni offices as well.

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⁵Existing resources (such as YaleInfo, the campus information system) were already focused on the campus community. The needs of the campus user are far different from the needs of the visitor, and by trying to design one page to be all things to all people, the redesign would do a disservice to both clienteles.

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Robert Callum ([email protected]) was the Electronic Publications Specialist for Academic Computing Services, Yale University. He is now pursuing an MPA and an MA in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.