erichobart

Visit School of Engineering & Computer Science

role

• site and content strategy
• architecture
• navigation
• developer
• interaction design

summary

The site creates an overarching identity for the university’s newest academic division, which contains two strong but loosely integrated schools. The navigation allows for separate exploration of the engineering department and computer science sites, but uses similar organizational, compositional and linking features to maintain the academic division’s identity throughout the website.

audience

The primary audiences are prospective undergraduate and graduate students and parents. Secondary audiences include high school admissions counselors, alumni and the industry partners who provide research opportunities and internships to members of this division.

features

• CSS design, with tables used only to present tabular data.
• Keyboard and screen-reader accessible, list-based dynamic menus created with CSS and javascript that degrade gracefully regardless of what device visitors use to access the site.

Visit Cadet uniforms

role

• front-end developer
• visual design
• interaction design

summary

Uniforms worn by Norwich University Corps of Cadets members are a powerful marketing element for prospective students considering the corps lifestyle. Current Cadets and alumni who were members of the corps also visit the page ocassionally. Before the redesign, images of Cadets in uniform were presented as thumbnails. To take full advantage of a new set of high-quality images taken by our photographer, I redesigned the page to offer larger images in a clean, open design. I also incorporated a javascript technique that grays out the background window when visitors click on an image to view a larger version. That keeps the eye focused on the single, larger image.

audience

The primary audience are prospective students and their parents. Secondary audiences include current corps members, alumni, and the general public.

features

• Open design that lets the images take precedence and includes enough whitespace to give each one prominence.
• Javascript technique that keeps attention focused on a single, large image when visitors click on one of the smaller images. This technique also follows the best practice of “graceful degradation/” Visitors who have turned off javascript will still be able to view the single, large images in another window. They just won’t see the larger window turn gray. Search engines can’t follow links created with javascript, so graceful degradation has the added benefit of allowing Google search spiders to move to the pages that hold the larger images and add them to the search results index.

Visit the page supporting Norwich’s built environment ad

role

• developer
• visual design
• interaction design

summary

Prospective students interested in the built environment have an opportunity to explore the three professions required for any project — architecture, engineering, and management. Norwich ran an ad in an engineering trade magazine to raise awareness among professionals that all three disciplines were located at the university. This Web page is a companion to the print ad. It needed to offer paths to each discipline’s “official” site and closely resemble the print ad.

audience

The primary audience is engineering professionals who subscribe to the magazine. The secondary audience is prospective undergraduate students who may read the magazine.

features

• CSS design.
• Tracking to measure visits to the page and number of clicks for each of the three links to each discipline’s “official” site.
• Strong interactive design to alert visitors to the presence of links when they move their cursor over the page.
• Strong visual cues that mirror the print ad, with enough difference to engage visitors who have just viewed the ad.