I wrote a blog post the day the Kenyon College site launched, and had intended to do something more splashy. I still might. We at White Whale are all very, very happy with how the Kenyon site came out, and are very proud of Kenyon’s able Public Affairs staff, who did a great job of implementing our CSS/XHTML designs into a sometimes unforgiving CMS; we’ve been there to help, but most of the finishing work was done on their end. So— Shawn, Patty, Rebecca: congratulations again.

But I’m really writing to talk about something specific that is happening to the design, which in my view is the most exciting thing about it.

At the beginning of this job, we brought the whole company to Kenyon’s campus for three days of meetings to talk about every imaginable aspect of the job. In those early meetings, whenever the conversation turned to including student-generated content on the home page, everyone expressed hesitation about whether Kenyon’s close-knit culture was ready for that kind of open channel. We pretty much assumed that Kenyon’s home page content (text and images both) would be under pretty tight editorial control for the foreseeable future.

When we finalized the site design, we suggested that the photo wall that dominates the home page might allow for the opportunity for student submissions. Although nobody was really sure if people would use it, the decision was made to include a “Submit Photos” link on the captions for the larger photos that result from clicking on the thumbnails. And they decided to give away a gift certificate to the cafe for any submissions they accepted.

And lo and behold, it’s starting to happen! If you click on the very middle photo in the wall (of two graduates); or the sixth photo in the top row, or the last photo in the second row, you’ll see photos submitted by students. This is just the beginning of what will eventually be something really interactive and exciting (and we’re building Kenyon a special page, as a farewell gift, to contain it all).

We work with a very small number of clients at any given time, and as a result we don’t get to enjoy the experience of a site launch very often; it sounds ridiculous, but our last site launch of major consequence was the Haverford site, which launched almost nine months ago.  We’ve certainly been hella busy since then, but this is our first flower to bloom in 2008.

I’ll have more to write about this later, most likely in an article for the main WW site.  I don’t think anyone reads this blog yet besides the other White Whalers, but just in case, to mark the occasion: here’s the first collection of Kenyon design ideas that we posted for internal discussion, on October 23, 2007.

My sincere thanks to everyone at Kenyon, everyone at WW, and everyone else reading this blog (which basically means you, Mom).

Here’s the document.  We’d welcome any comments.

Kenyon College Usability Testing Protocol