My tips for a successful site redesign (especially in a higher-education setting):
- Let Google Analytics be your guide. Look at what pages people currently actually use.
- Get your stakeholders to give you a site goal- who is the audience? What is the purpose of the website? Administrators can forget that a website is NOT a repository for all of their knowledge but should instead be focused on a specific task.
- Determine 8-10 “tasks” for A/B testing and ask a random study group to participate to complete that short list of tasks. Examples of question types from past studies I’ve done:
- Who do I contact about X?
- Where would I find the date to apply/register for X?
- Who is the chair of the department? How did you find their web page?
- What services do we offer?
- What’s the best way to contact the administrative support team?
I will carefully and emphatically repeat: your website is NOT the appropriate place to place every bit of knowledge you have.