Harvard To Redesign Home Page After Survey

Anticipating an upcoming redesign of www.harvard.edu, the University is conducting a survey on its home page about how people use the site.

The survey does not appear every time a user visits the website, as Harvard is conducting a “random sampling” of users, according to University webmaster Elaine Benfatto.

It asks users “what question are you trying to answer with this visit to the Harvard website,” among other queries.

“This is the first online survey we’ve asked people to do,”Benfatto said. “We’re looking at a redesign of the whole Harvard homepage.”

The responses so far have been less than a “clear mandate” for specific overarching change, because there are so many “target audiences” who use Harvard’s web page, Benfatto said.

Ordinarily, 80 percent of users seek 20 percent of the website’s information, Benfatto said.

“That rule absolutely doesn’t apply to the Harvard hompage,” Benfatto said. “A lot of people want to know a lot of different stuff. We need to be all things to all people.”

Benfatto said that the current webpage has been relatively unchanged for three years, and that the redesign will happen sometime during this academic year.