2. Today’s Goal
• We want to achieve a new website
organization:
– Homepage (‘Museum Lobby’)
– Sitemap (‘Exhibition Site’)
• Your Mission: We invite you to think about
the website as a museum. You are planning
an exhibition of the School’s concept, work
and content.
7. Think Pair: Persistent Navigation
• Form groups of 2-3
• What are the 10
orientation points
you want to put on
the exhibition flyer?
• Time: 10 minutes
8. Think Pair: Persistent Navigation
• Switch and critique
• Which parts of the
website should be
always just one click
away?
• Use differently
colored pen to alter,
change or add
• Time: 5 minutes
9. Group Exercise: Structure
• Work in groups
(government vs.
courts)
• Build a structure for
your area of
expertise
(government / court)
• Time: 30 minutes
Who are we?
What do we do?
How do we organize our work?
What are our areas of specialty?
Who is affiliated with us?
What is our output (applied research, teaching, advising?)
Why are we part of the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, a research university?
How does the MPA fit?
The lobby needs to tell people who we are and what we do. It should explain how this museum is organized - ideally, at a glance, a visitor will understand the theme of the exhibition and the various areas he or she can explore. The lobby should also give an idea of the highlights that we house and entice people to stay. Since we have a large collection, we need to communicate the overall purpose, but also the character of different subsets that groups of visitors may find interesting.
We also need to plan the overall layout of the exhibition. How will we use the museum space to structure our exhibition? For example, do we have a government wing, a courts wing, an MPA floor and specialty collection rooms for the CPT and EFC? In order to guide people effectively to where they want to go, we need to organize out material around common themes. We also want to engage people through activity: What can the site visitor find, do, buy, see, download, browse?
Think about our website as an exhibition space. In a museum, wayfinding is a two-sided sword. On the one hand, you want to facilitate orientation. People should move around with ease instead of stumbling from one dead-end to another. Therefore, the exhibition layout needs to be meaningful for the visitor and thus easy to grasp and remember. On the other hand, you want to facilitate learning and discovery. The spatial arrangement of artifacts should tell the visitor something about their relationship to one another. You want to allow for new, serendipitous connections that the visitor did not look for or even anticipated.
We also want people to not overlook artifacts that are important. How can we make sure that the visitors do not miss out on our most prized exhibits?
Each Building Block represents content – either a resource site, or other site element, like the publications or course catalogue or tools – for example LRS or C-CAT, centers like the CPT and EFC, or initiatives. The plates represent main gateways or portals (rooms of your exhibition space). How do you get from one information item to another? How do they relate to one another? Can we form larger, meaningful groups of items?
Let’s bring it together! Use this poster and the sticky notes to write down the elements we need to display in the lobby to communicate the structure that you have created. (15 minutes)
