Develop a story in your organization to share with colleagues that help explain issues that need to be addressed
Around 1 year ago, our library is planned to revamp our web site. In our plan it will give user a brand new image, eye catching effects and enhanced features. I am responsible on implementing this project. At first I expect this web site can have beautiful, clean and user friendly design.
All the things are going smooth until I started to work with other departments within my organization. The library homepage has the largest hit rate within our whole site. Many departments want their projects can occupy the most attractive area in homepage. Finally our library homepage has contained too many things, even the title bar has lots of options (our project name) for user to choose. Everyone wants user can be as quickly as possible to go into their detail page without making one more click. It causes the homepage loss the main focus and I always heard that people complain the title bar has too many options.
I understand it is very common that every departments and project leader want their services can have the best position to reach user. But sometimes it really need a balance and I think if our library homepage is too messy, it will not success to attract our user at the first place. We can see cooperation is a very important issue in an organization that we should consider and contribute to.
In my organization, there are some programme banners and college banners in the homepage of our school website. Every programme team would like to use these banners to promote their programmes. The fact is that the banners are limited for us to use. Our school practise is that every college has one programme banner and one college banner. For example, the programmes under the same college need to apply the banner through submitting the form. In the form, you have to fill in the expected delivery date of your programme banner. It is using a first in first come method, if there is no other submitted form in your requesting period, then the programme banner during that week is belong to your programme. We always submit the form there months before our enrollment deadline. In this way, every programme can use the banner when there is a need. It is a better way to share the school resource in an effective and efficient way.
ReplyDeleteMartin thanks for your sharing! I also think that the coordination is important, especially in doing cross-department project. As every department have their specific function and skill, they don't know and understand each others. They think their opinions are good enough for designing the project and ignoring other factors which are also important. I remember Bob used to make a example that if we are going to design a new learning and information common building, we can't only consult the opinions from architect because they only know how to design the "hardware" even their mind are still in their studying periods. They can't keep updated with the new learning environment and they need to communicate with learning designers for designing the "software" of the common. Form this case we can see that, the cooperation, coordination and communication are very important for nowadays working environments.
ReplyDeleteA big organizartion should have this problem. For website, I also think that simple design can be more eye-catching and easy for users to view, learn and search. In this case, I think you got a hard work and it's not easy to balance each department head's opinion. Same as marco, constant communication should be the answer!
ReplyDeleteHi Martin. I agree with you that a balance point needs to be made when a decision like that is made.
ReplyDeleteEdward (MITEChange)