The document summarizes Brian Dunbar's presentation on taking an audience-centric approach to website design and management. It outlines the key audiences for NASA's website, how usability testing informed a redesign in 2007, and lessons learned about providing the information audiences seek through multimedia, events coverage and an iterative process of monitoring traffic and feedback.
2. Web Executive Seminars Thanks, Come Again: Audience-Centric User Experience November 5, 2009 National Press Club Washington, DC Learn more: www.forumone.com/thanks
Mars Pathfinder: Landed on July 4, with extensive media coverage. On the following Monday (when people got back to their offices and faster computer connections) they came to www.nasa.gov looking for pictures. And they saw this . . .
NASA Home Page 1994-1997 Where on this interface would you expect to click for pictures from a rover on Mars? 200K image map in the days of 14.4 modems 48 million-hit day Server so busy it appeared to public to be offline Once people got through, where was it on www.nasa.gov? Design Reflected Org Chart Assumed users knew how NASA was organized Required them to *think* about where content *might* be Did not showcase audience's primary interests: Current news Images
NASA Home Page, 1997-2003 Adopted newspaper "news of the day" format Still no audience differentiation Like the news format Generally clearer organization, layout Mix of technical, general leaves all unsatisfied Fragmented NASA Web Design began to age -- no multimedia Very static -- ok in '97, not so in '03 Ultimately too many links Still no high traffic capacity
How did we know these were our audiences? E-mail telling us so, combined with internal requests.
Direction to focus on public, K-12 students and teachers Break out audience-based navigation Further navigation taken from NASA Vision statement Short term problems: NASA history, people Long-term: Vision for Space Exploration "Humans in Space", "Exploring the Universe" or both?
Solicited input from several design firms and gave short-term contracts to develop a few comps. This is design 1. Note the navigation icons toward upper right.
This is design 2.
Restructure navigation Audience still useful Move toward topics – how does the public mentally organize NASA's work? Add blogs, user commenting, other Web 2.0 features Begin with multiple approaches and be prepared to adapt
Metrics are an essential element of any plan to keep people coming back for your content.
NASA is pushing Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for official communications For the time being, the web site is still where more people go Videos are viewed up to 10X more on the site than on YouTube LCROSS lunar impact, October 2009 Est. 250,000 following on social media Est. 5 million following on www.nasa.gov Our web site is where our core content is Social media are limited (e.g., Twitter character limit) Social media provide no context Social media value lies in drawing attention to something happening now We'll all be learning more quickly