Blink Designworks in the Spotlight

The University of Chicago Hospitals

Memory Center
The Challenge
The Solution

Asthma Center
The Challenge
The Solution

We began with questionnaires, working closely with the college to develop a comprehensive content outline which would support our plan for combining carefully constructed iconography with structure-based filtering techniques. The idea was to organize what would otherwise be an unwieldy tangle of information into manageable, user-friendly, well-defined discovery paths by structuring the site contextually. Using our resultant navigation scheme and graphics from Sandbox, we built, tested, and de-bugged a complete, working, pre-linked skeleton of the entire site, along with a comprehensive system of templates which would allow the Elmhurst College in-house production team to easily expand and maintain the site. As a final step, the college production team would write and paste their own content into the finished structure.

Elmhurst College
The Challenge
The Solution

Getting around on the site is a breeze. From the welcome page, we begin filtering by audience, breaking our viewer base into a few large chunks. As our visitors make choices and drop into the lower levels of the site where the granularity of information is finer, we begin to filter by topic, then finally by task.

Instead of presenting our viewers with a growing array of choices as we go down into the site, the use of hubs allows us to greatly simplify menus on most of the lower level pages. Subtle visual cues provide extra information to the viewers. In the menus, for instance, green buttons lead down into the structure to finer levels of detail, blue buttons lead back up to navigation hubs.

Although the site contains a huge amount of information, the structure creates the illusion that the experience has been personalized for the viewer. A visitor entering the site as a transfer student, for instance, could thoroughly mine the site for everything he or she needed to know without ever leaving the transfer students section. For someone who just wanted to browse, access to any other section of the site is only one click away. While the construction of the site in this manner required a rather elaborate planning phase, the structure which resulted from taking advantage of this logical progression towards a finer and finer level of detail resulted in an interface which scored high for intuitivity among web viewers without the expense of building and maintaining active pages.

Because so much of the basic information about the college is repeated throughout the site, we needed to explore ways to reduce the complexity and cost of maintenance. To eliminate the expense of building and maintaining duplicate pages, shared information is “broadcast” throughout the site. Financial Aid frames, for instance, which are shared in six different sections, are contained in their own folder and exported to wherever they are needed, making maintenance of multiple pages a simple matter of changing a single file.

Status: Although maintenance work is ongoing, the site is up and running and has been warmly received by the viewers.

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