Last week we launched the long anticipated Law School website (opens new window). This is our second launch of the website, the first was in February 2009 (opens new window), since then it has taken top honors (opens new window) two years in a row. The first redesign worked great as a step in the right direction, but over time the goals of the Law School and how they serve their students have changed. The main navigation started to get overgrown and we realized it was time to re-align their site. In the end the re-align turned into a complete redesign.

What worked well

The previous site gave a real impression of the school and highlighted students, faculty and alumni stories. These stories were not represented on the original website. Every day law faculty are making news and their accomplishments were highlighted on the homepage. These continuously updating features were a way to get a pulse of the Law School at a glance. We wanted to make sure these featured stayed.

Secondly the faculty profiles worked really well as a central hub of information. It not only included their basic bio information but was also a collection of their news, publications, books, etc. We knew this information had to stay, it was how reporter learned about and confirmed their credibility before interviewing or quoting them.

What needed to change

Building an impression of the Law School was a major push on the previous website. The primary way that was accomplished was a large centerpiece photo on every page. Originally the Law School didn't the visual presence it deserved, this main image changed that. The centerpiece image worked great the first few months but over time we realized the images were getting in the way of the content. Every page required the user to scroll, the content didn't start till 60% down the page. We knew we needed to change this.

Secondly, the navigation was growing at an enormous rate, the Law School was expanding and the horizontal menu and its categories no longer worked. The navigation had to change to be expandable and aligned to fit the new needs of the school. We ended up starting completely over with the information architecture.

New site features

Over the past year the Law School has begun reaching out to current and prospective students in the social space. We wanted to include that presence in the site beyond just linking to it. The new homepage includes videos from YouTube and photos from Flickr with more social integration planned for down the road.

Because the Law School is continuously publishing content, getting noticed in the media, having events, etc. what ended up taking shape as we started to sketch the wireframes was a newspaper type format. For us this was an important distinction between the two goals for the school, provide great information to facilitate the visitor and to raise the stature of the school. With prospective law students having a short list of schools they know they want to apply to and a maybe list we knew impression was important. The new design needed to do two things, help the students who knew we were one of their top picks to get admissions information quickly. The second is to change the opinion in the first 10 seconds for those students who were still on the fence. Having all of this information on the homepage is meant to change those student's mind.

Faculty are being highlighted all over the site and we wanted to ensure their presence wasn't an afterthought. Since their profiles are the compilation of all their work at the law school we wanted to make sure it was as findable as possible. The old site used a numerical ID system to reference the faculty, we decided to use their standard first.last name as the URL for their profile. This gives the URL far more context around what is going to be on the page. Ex. http://law.wayne.edu/profile/robert.ackerman/ (opens new window)

Building for the future

I have been talking a lot lately about iterative website redesign (opens new window) and reading this you are probably thinking I am a total hypocrite. Yes, we did change the navigation and the design but it is progressively moving in a direction that supports user goals. I talk a lot about the reasons for doing a full redesign because their are some and the offerings that the Law School added over time needed a place. The old design wasn't built for progressive enhancement, the new design is.

The design is based on a grid that can be adapted as time goes on and as we see how visitors use the site. The navigation is vertical which will allow us to add and remove items as we need. In the end the user experience is far better and the Law School is represented with it's strongest feature front and center, great faculty and student.

View the new Law School website at: http://law.wayne.edu/ (opens new window)