A new dawn, a new day, a new site
Today, we launch the new Jisc website.
New design
The first thing you’ll notice is the visual design, carrying the new Jisc brand and logo. We have a lovely colour palette and elegant font to play with, which has helped us to create spacious, flexible canvases for our content.
We put a lot of emphasis on typography. You told us that it was hard to read the small and sometimes dense text on the previous website, particularly on longer documents. So one of our key design objectives was to make the reading experience a pleasure. Try this guide and let us know what you think
New structure
We’ve arranged the website under our four key areas of work, using labels that we thoroughly road tested with users to make sure they were understood. Hover or tap on one of the main headings and a sub-menu will appear that groups our products and services under accessible themes. We hope this helps you to find the information you need much easier and quicker.
We also wanted to clearly differentiate between our ‘ready for market’ products and services and our research and development activity. Research and development is a hugely important part of what we do - it’s the engine that drives the products and services of the future - but some of you told us that you just want to get at the stuff you can use now - our digital content, network and IT services and advice.
New features
Start typing into the ‘smart search’ and it will start predicting what you are looking for. It will also surface the most likely details you are looking for, such as someone’s phone number or the date of an event, so you don’t have to go to another page to complete your task. We’re very pleased with the search but it does need testing ‘in the wild’ so let us know how it can be made even better.
The website is responsive, which means it flexes and changes to fit the size of the device or browser it is viewed upon. Try looking at it on your smartphone or a tablet in portrait view and you’ll see the difference from the full ‘desktop’ view. Yes, you could view the previous site on a mobile, but it wasn’t much fun. Now, if you want to read the latest report from Jisc on your mobile on the train home, you’ll have a much better experience.
Your needs at the centre
At the start of the project, we talked to a bunch of you about your needs. This inspired our initial ideas about website principles, structure and terminology - that we further tested with another bunch of you. We then used our knowledge of best practice in usability and design to build the website.
But we don’t put our feet up now the site has launched. We’ll be looking to test it with users very soon to make sure it is helping you do your job. If you’d like to take part, get in touch.
Feedback
We are committed to developing and refining this site - but we can’t do that without your feedback. Do tell us what you think.
And please let us know if you spot any bugs or problems. We’ve been over it countless times but we will have missed stuff.
You can either email us at web@jisc.ac.uk or tag any tweets #jiscweb
Find out more
If you want to find out more about how we built this website, check out our team blog.
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