Tag Archives: CMC

CMC’s Website Redesign: the good, the bad and the ugly

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CMC recently redesigned its website. Here are my thoughts on the redesign. Note that I don't have any data, and I haven't conducted any tests on users, so the stuff I'm writing here might be totally bunk. But if no one has any data, we might as well go with my opinion, as I've read the entire back collection of articles on useit.com, as well as Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and CMC's Public Affairs Office probably hasn't.

The Good

CMC quick links bar The new "Quick Links" bar.

This has a good list of places that I visit most often. This should probably be contextual based on the page you're currently on, so the "Faculty" page would have different quick links than the "Students" page, but again they should be testing this on actual users.

cmc contact info Contact information on most pages.

Most pages have phone numbers and addresses listed in a prominent location. This is an excellent step and something I've called for.

The footer.
cmc website footer
On a site like CMC's where users have a diverse set of goals, you want to get people to where they are trying to go as quickly as possible. The footer makes this possible with a ton of deep links to pages you probably want to visit.

Much more readable faculty profile pages, as well as an acknowledgement that social media and student websites exist.

The Bad

Horribly small default font size.
small font size on cmc website
The default font size is 11px, which is fine for people under 40, but really difficult to read for people over 40, especially because users don't know how to change the font size in their browser. In addition, a small font size makes a link more difficult to click on because the target is so small - see Fitts Law. The small font size makes it hard to distinguish text in low contrast environments as well. cmc website small text

Not changing the color of visited links.
cmc visited unvisited links
On a Google search results page, I can see at one glance which links I've already visited, because they are purple. No such luck on CMC's site, which displays every link in blue. This violates rule #3 of Jakob Nielsen's Top 10 Mistakes of Web Design, and has been shown in tests to disorient users, and cause them to visit the same page over and over.

The menu bar text shows up inconsistently.
missing menu text
The menu bar is the series of grayish-red boxes, which as you can see contain no text. This photo was using the latest version of Chrome on a Mac. Props to CMC for trying to use Cufon but they need to work out the bugs and test in all browsers.

No mobile version of the site.
Mobile devices should load an alternate stylesheet that presents the main content without the fluff, to save bandwidth and optimize the information presentation for a smaller screen.

Clicking on the logo doesn't take you back to the frontpage.
When you click on the logo in the corner of every page you are taken to cmc.edu/discovercmc, instead of the homepage. This violates a well known usability convention: if the logo is clickable, it should take you to the homepage. I challenge you to find a top 500 website where this is not true.

No Analytics.
This means that Public Affairs isn't collecting data about which pages are popular, which keywords users are searching for to find our site, and which links are being clicked on, which implies they don't really care about how users use the site, and will hurt their ability to iteratively improve the site navigation in the future.

No caching site resources or minifying Javascript.
Page load times are slow; CMC scores only 63/100 in Google's Online Page Speed tool. Because no images, scripts or stylesheets are cached, they have to be reloaded every time the user reloads a page. This is costly in terms of speed and bandwidth. Fortunately this is easily fixable in Apache.

The Ugly

The homepage.
cmc frontpage Holy cow, this is a mess. Some of the problems:
  • No search bar. This is stupid - the search bar exists in the page's source but is hidden from the user.
  • Fourteen links to other pages. On a page whose goal should be to get users deep within the site as quickly as possible, having this few links is unacceptable.
  • Incredibly small link targets make the links hard to click.
  • No skip links for disabled users.
  • Changing the center image will require extensive Photoshopping to remove the background, which in the end will reduce the total number of changes made to the frontpage slideshow.
  • The "Discover CMC" link looks like an ad, and I missed it the first six times I visited the homepage
  • There's no way to determine at a glance what separates CMC from every other university. One of the boxes has some bland text below a "Why CMC" header but the page has to do better.
  • It's not clear where you should click to find any of the items described here:
    University Website
  • No meta description or keywords, which are essential for search engine optimization (SEO).
    cmc no meta
Fortunately, if my search habits are at all typical, most people use Google instead of the homepage to find resources on CMC's site. But the new homepage is the flagship, and it violates most usability guidelines. It reminds me of flash intro sites from the '90's that used to load when you went to Nike.com or Boo.com. Those flash intros looked really cool when they were presented to management, but loaded slowly and caused shitloads of usability problems, which is why sites don't have flash intros anymore. The homepage is a huge step backwards from the old page.

Big Ass Images that Convey No Information
Here's the homepage for current students:
cmc student gateway
And here are the parts of that page that are actually clickable:
cmc student gateway links
The prime real estate on the page is taken by an unclickable infographic telling us that upperclassmen return to campus on August 28. Here's the same information, in a more compressed format: 
8/28 Students Return
The image on the page is 465 pixels wide by 290 high, or 134850 pixels of screen real estate. My compressed version is roughly 150 pixels wide by 18 high, for 2700 pixels of screen space, a 4900% improvement in information density.

More generally, big ass images take forever to load (especially important on mobile devices) and don't contribute anything to the page. User test after user test shows users ignore filler images, and that visual bloat is annoying.

The SEO strategy/URL's are still awful.
To illustrate CMC's nonexistent approach to search engine optimization (SEO), I'll use the faculty page for my thesis reader.
ananda ganguly
The page looks OK - the email link is a little wonky but it's fine. Now, what are the keywords we'd like to use to describe this page? The biggest one is the name of the professor - Ananda Ganguly. The second biggest is his department, Accounting, and then maybe we want to also have CMC as a keyword.

URL Contains No Keywords
Let's look at the page URL, which Google uses as part of its PageRank formula to determine what's actually on the page:

http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/academic/faculty/profile.php?Fac=519

This URL does not contain any of our relevant keywords, making the page tougher to find in a Google Search.

Nondescript Page Title
Let's look at the page title, which shows up in the browser bar, and is the bright blue link text when the page shows up in Google results, as well as a large component in the PageRank formula:

ganguly page title
The page title is "Academics," which tells you zero about the page content. Since this page title is so non-descriptive, Google had to use its own algorithm to give the page a descriptive title in search results:
ganguly google title

Generic Meta Tags
Let's look at the page meta description, which shows up as the black text below the blue text in a search result in Google:
ganguly meta description
The meta description is "Academics and research at Claremont McKenna College," which is generic enough that Google has to try to find better text on the page to use. The result isn't optimal:
ganguly google text

No H1 Heading
Pages should have exactly one h1 heading containing information about the primary subject of the page text on the page. There's a perfect candidate - the professor's name, Ananda Ganguly. This text does not have an h1 heading - in fact, there's not a single h1 heading on the page.

No Alt Text for Images
There's a nice image of Professor Ganguly on the page. Images can't be crawled, it's important to provide an alt tag so Google knows what's in the image, as well as for blind users or users on slow internet connections. However, the image does not have an alt tag, so Google doesn't know the subject of the image.

Those are some really, really basic SEO optimizations. Figuring that stuff out would make CMC pages more prominent when researchers from other schools search for work done by CMC professors. I haven't done a thorough examination but I'm not confident that the rest of the site does much better.

Conclusion

I have the following questions for the CMC Public Affairs Office:

  1. When deciding what to emphasize in the site redesign, did you interview a single user of the site? Did you ask any students, prospective students, faculty members, staff members, alumni members, or parents, about how they use the CMC website?
  2. How does the redesigned site address the complaints raised by users in question (1)?
  3. Could you explain how the new frontpage does a better job of conveying CMC's brand than the old frontpage? When you showed the frontpage to prospective students for 30 seconds and asked them to say what set CMC apart, what did they tell you?
  4. What metrics are you using to determine the success of the site redesign?
  5. What was the decision making process during the design of the site? Was evidence from user testing ever presented to inform design decisions?
CMC's website hasn't been that great for years and it's good to see that it's finally getting more attention and resources. But while the new design is flashy, it's not clear that it became more usable, which is disappointing.

Wilderness first responder training

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  • CMC brought in a Wilderness First Response expert to teach us first aid so we could be prepared while leading freshmen on orientation trips in the backcountry. We had been partying every night and everyone was hung over for the talk, but even so, the nonchalance of some group members towards the emergency training put me off. The guy at the front of the room was treated as an outsider. He was dressed like an outdoors guy and wasn’t shy about discussing violent injuries or putting his hands on someone to demonstrate the correct way to administer aid. We all laughed nervously when he did this. There was a low chance we would have to use any of the training, but the consequences of failure in a risky situation are huge. I sat through most of the meeting imagining having to face a room full of lawyers and angry, sad parents, and focused the whole way. I thought about saying something to the group but decided that I probably just wanted to show how much I cared about the training. On the whole the benefit from acting cool (acting tired, telling jokes, telling asides) probably outweighed the potential cost of not paying close enough attention to the training.
  • The guy CMC brought in was clearly an expert who flew across the country helping educate people and advising other first responders on the best course of action. He must see people get maimed, mauled or killed every day in the backcountry. When he tries to educate people (us) on how to prevent deaths in the future, we respond by not taking him very seriously. That must have hurt, yet he seemed fairly resigned about the whole process.
  • I was surprised that so much of the treatment focused on correct diagnosis and response and so little focused on overcoming the social pressure to take it seriously. Anyone who’s read about Kitty Genovese, the smoke alarm room experiment, or Asch’s studies on conformity can tell you that a large component of the response is recognizing the problem. Furthermore, the victim will be under social pressure as well and might insist that they’re fine even though they’re dizzy, or they’re beginning to get hypothermia. Other times victims might try to hide the problem; the most common place to find choking victims is on the floor in the bathroom, unconscious.
    When I expressed my worries the other leaders said “I think in the real situation we would know how to handle it.” I had some confidence they could diagnose problems in freshmen but what if a fellow leader, or a teacher tagging along on the trip, needed treatment? There would be significant chance of social pressure inhibiting response.
  • I was also surprised that the Red Cross, the American Heart Association and our teacher’s organization still disagree on the correct method of treatment in many cases. I asked the teacher why and he said that there are tradeoffs in liability, long-term patient safety and knowledge. Red Cross tends to go for “help the patient, deal with liability later” and teaches their courses in the simplest way they can imagine to maximize the chances you remember the training. This was more advanced and often corrected the training I’d gotten last summer for the Red Cross.
  • The teacher often corrected people’s misconceptions about symptoms and treatment. Many of these are staggering. Drowning victims, for example, do not flail their arms.

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Friday

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Applied Materials

  • Everyone knows Moore’s Law, that semiprocessor power doubles every 18 months. I asked if there was a similar law for solar panel efficiency. George Davis said no, mainly because his product is dependent on outside conditions like the weather. Solar panels are more effective in California than in Germany.

KKR

  • Some speakers are very good and know how to be interesting. They will take whatever question you ask and run with it. With these speakers, you want to ask a general question and let them run with it. These types of speakers are also good at ignoring the question you asked and answering the question you probably should have asked, or the question they want to answer.
  • Other speakers will stick to generalities, like “We worked hard and we had a lot of success.” Faced with this type of speaker it’s best to get very specific about what you want to hear about. “Could you tell us about the single biggest mistake you’ve made during your time here?” George Roberts, while brilliant, falls into the second category of speaker.
  • The BusinessWeek article about their plan to emulate Berkshire Hathaway was based off of one comment they made; while it would be great to be Berkshire, that’s not really their plan.
  • KKR is going public because the only way to grow their business is through growing the amount of assets they control. They can get more money if they go public. They’ve tried to go public four different times but failed; if your idea makes sense, be persistent.
  • One of their biggest mistakes was not changing management quickly enough. It’s hard to fire someone.
  • I asked Mr. Roberts if it was true that he used to spend lots of time proposing acquisitions while he was in school. He said yes; he would look up companies in an industry magazine and then write proposals. If the company didn’t write him back, it only cost a postage stamp. That’s a great attitude. Now it’s even cheaper, because of email. While striking a deal or getting someone important to write back is low, the cost of sending email or a letter is lower.
  • Another student asked his opinion on the financial crisis. Roberts in turn asked the student what he thought. The student said he didn’t know, so Roberts asked him what his gut told him. I thought that was interesting, because a lot of times your gut reaction is misleading. Consider most people’s gut reaction to a minimum wage, to a bubble or to free trade.
  • Roberts told us to go work for a company that sells a product, so that we can learn how businesses work. You can’t really learn about that on Wall Street.
  • I asked Roberts how he negotiates. He said most of all people do business with people that they like and trust. And that you need to be able to listen to what other people want. Good advice, I guess.

Chair Rankings

It’s important to have good chairs. Without further ado:

1. KKR

2. Microsoft

3. Applied Materials

4. EMC

5. Meebo (excellent chairs, but lose points for only having six)

6. Atlassian

7. Google/Youtube

8. Lockheed Martin

9. EA

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Thursday

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Google

  • The trip started off with a very nice young lawyer showing us the campus and telling us about all of the Google perks and quirks. For example, every worker must be within 150 feet of free food, the building numbers start at 42, some guy built a vending machine that displays prices based on how healthy things are, we take lots of awesome trips, here’s a screen that shows what people are searching for in real time, etc. These are traps. The message that everyone should have taken from all of this is, We are fucking good at selling ads. They only afford all of the perks because the people that work there are unbelievably talented, and they don’t want those people worrying about anything besides organizing and archiving all of the world’s information, and otherwise doing really cool shit. All of the perks are like flashy traps. Never forget that Google is really good at making money.
  • Google is also very good at a meta level; they’re not only good at delivering relevant search results and selling ads but they’re also good at being a company. Everything at Google is well thought through, and works well. While you’re on the toilet, you can read a daily 1-page tutorial on good coding practice. The company is constantly re-evaluating what they are doing and the sort of proceses they use. The word several employees used is “It’s a mess around here right now.” It was a similar to the practice of the best teachers in the Atlantic article on great teachers from a few days ago – when evaluators want to come see them, they all say that the evaluator can’t come in right now, because they’re revamping their whole math curriculum or implementing a new module. The theme is constant improvement. Google is trying desperately hard to stay nimble and maintain the ethos of a small startup.
  • I observed that Google employees are very good at getting things done. When something should be done, like the chairs are uncomfortable or the recycling program stinks, Google people are very likely to just do it. Respect.
  • When you assemble the world’s greatest talent in one area and create an amazing culture, you can do unbelievable things. Most of the world’s greatest works of art were produced in two Italian towns in a period of about 100 years, during the Renaissance. The University of Chicago had pretty much every good economist and finance professor in the 70′s and 80′s – Fama, French, Coase, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Black and Scholes, Harry Markowitz, Kenneth Arrow and Friedrich Hayek were all there. I would argue there’s a similar concentration of talent in Silicon Valley right now.
  • Job titles are irrelevant. No one at the company does exactly the same thing for very long – people get shifted around within the company, they work on different projects, they learn about new things. The needs of a company change rapidly, so the idea of training people for specific tasks (or even trying to centrally manage an economy) is a little silly.
  • Monetary compensation isn’t as high as at other companies but Google outspends everyone else on perks, and rewards its top talent very well (In the range of baseball player salaries, according to Jonathan Rosenberg). Most people in SV are very focused on work-life balance; short commutes, and doing a job that doesn’t drive you up a wall with boredom or frustration. SV people recognize the importance of quality of life.
  • Jonathan Rosenberg is one of the top people at Google. He compared career hunting to surfing; your goal is to catch a big wave and ride it. Rosenberg continually tried to figure out what the next new thing in technology was, from creating information systems within companies, to helping companies collect outside information, to creating fast Internet connections, and finally search, moving from company to company as the hot new product changed. Larry Page and Sergey Brin convinced him of the money in search when they said, “Search is the moment that the user tells the computer what you’re looking for.”
  • It’s interesting to see how companies divide up the workspace. At Meebo, everyone was out in the open, with three or four people all facing each other in clusters. Same at Atlassian. At Google and EA, most people had three-person cubicles. EMC had tall individual cubicles you couldn’t see over, and corner offices. Google also had these cool yurt things that blocked out sound and had individual temperature control. Pretty cool.
  • Everyone has at least two screens, usually giant ones. Those aren’t cheap; companies must realize that having so many screens helps productivity.
  • The question ramble: In the face of silence, people get nervous. I love when someone asks a question and then starts to ramble on and on, trying to fill the silence. Often they provide a justificat
  • When you’re sitting around a conference table, you need to pick your seat well. The best seats are closest to the speaker, on the sides of the table. The next best seats are at the other end of the table, directly facing the speaker. The next best seat is in front of the speaker, so that if you were facing the table your back would be to the speaker (if chairs are there). The worst is on the sides, away from the speaker. Often the speaker takes the side of the table closest to the door. It’s a tactical mistake to walk all the way into the room and take the furthest seat; you want to take the best seat and leave the stragglers in the worst spots.
  • The opposite strategy applies for sitting in the backseat of a crowded car. The last person in the car never sits in the middle seat. Thus, delay moving towards the car by all possible means.
  • Google Labs are a way of telling employees that there aren’t any rules about which products get chosen; if you have a product you can put it in Labs. To get a product out of Labs, it needs to get used a lot. Google doesn’t care much about profitability for their products, because they make so much from ads. They have the luxury of time that many other startups don’t.
  • Rosenberg told a great story about how an internship he applied for came down to the final two applicants, himself and Mr. Perfect, who was tall and handsome and beat him at everything. Rosenberg hit it off with the employer’s administrative assistant and Mr. Perfect didn’t, and Rosenberg got the job. “If you want to know which first-year bankers are going to make it, ask the assistants which ones they like. The ones they like are the ones who are successful.” The lesson is be nice to the people that set your schedule; they work harder and for lower pay.

Youtube – Steve Grove ’00

  • Steve Grove is a great example of someone who gets stuff done. He proposed to the Kennedy School of Government that he would fly around the world and film their graduates doing all of these amazing things, and they agreed to fund him. So he got to go around the world for free and get some experience filming people.
  • Grove also wrote up YouTube and pitched a politics channel to them. He pretty much built the Youtube politics division from the ground up, and has interviewed many candidates. He took initiative and landed two really cool jobs.
  • It’s pretty cheap to generate video and post it on Youtube. How long until we have 24-hour coverage of a candidate? The Barack Obama Youtube channel, giving you 24 hours of Barack, commentary on Barack, testimony from voters, donor drives, etc.
  • Youtube’s starting to transcribe videos. This allows you to get an idea of the speech, and then read the rest of the transcription. You can also search within the video by keyword.
  • Before the JK Wedding video, Chris Brown’s “Forever” was #270 on the Billboard charts. After the video it shot to #4. Youtube begged UMG not to pull the video, now they share the revenues from ads based on the video. There’s money to be made there, instead of pulling content that you produced.

Dean Huang to stay at CMC

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In an email to the student body, beloved Dean of Students Jeff Huang announced that he is going to stay at CMC. Jeff is a good guy and we’ve talked a lot, and as far as I know he does his job well, both as Dean of Students and as a philosophy professor, with some of the highest ratings in the evaluations book.

This is a little silly to say now, and obviously it’s sad to see anyone with whom you’ve developed a close relationship leave for greener pastures, but is it unreasonable to assume that CMC would hire a replacement dean that’s just as good? CMC would probably solicit close to two hundred applications for a replacement; surely one of two hundred is qualified, friendly, and understanding enough to take his place.

A similar neuron fires when I hear people discuss how going to CMC was the best decision they ever made. Was it really CMC that was the good decision, or was it going to college in general? Unless you’ve transferred, studied abroad or have significant reason to believe that CMC is special, you’ve got to assume that you would have had just as good an experience anywhere.

Another similar neuron fires when sports teams overpay for local heroes when their contracts have expired, something the Oakland A’s have chosen not to do probably twenty times over the past decade. Surely fans can fall in love with other great players, who are cheaper.

“Refusing to overpay for local heroes” is also a good way to describe my dating life for the past three years.