Here are the questions I plan to ask folks for content suggestions. Feel free to add or subtract from this list.

What’s your role?

* Student (Grad, Undergrad)
* Staff
* Faculty
* Parent
* International
* Potential Student

If your a student then what class are you?

Why did you choose to come to UF?

What attracted you to UF?

Do you like what Gainesville has to offer?

Did your parents play a big role in your decision to come to UF?

Where is your favorite place on campus to study?

Where is your favorite place on campus to relax/admire?

Where is your least favorite place on campus?

What features would you like to see in a Virtual Tour?

What would you expect to get out a UF Virtual Tour?

What area’s of campus would you like to have featured in a virtual tour?

Below is the first comp for the Virtual Tour template skin design. Allow me to explain the purpose and/or function of the Virtual Tour so you can get a better idea of why we did what we did.

Purpose of the V.T.:
1. To merchandise the campus.
2. Illustrate the "friendliness and hospitality" of the folks on campus.
3. Show the beauty of campus using real life photos (not vector art, illustrations, or Photoshop effects).
4. Focus on the HiDef video, photo slideshow, interactive map Flash area.
5. A clean and minimal template design. We don't want the site design to 'take away' focus from the Flash content area.
6. Keep "text content" to a minimum. We don't want to overwhelm site visitors with to much information. Again, focus should be on the Flash area.

What you are looking at below is the Academics section (page) of the tour. Notice how simple and clean the page is. All the focus is on the Flash video area. A short intro animation will take place then the video will automatically begin to play. Users can also view a photo slideshow and interactive map. Users can then click the "Related Info" blue bar and jQuery will slide down to reveal related information.


This is what visitors will see once the blue "Related Information" nav bar is clicked. We plan on having a brief intro paragraph, Related Buildings list (click one of those links and lytebox will pop up with a photo and info), Related Resources (pertaining to the tour section), Student Quotes (makes the page more human in nature), nice big images of people and campus, more related info, and finally Tour Stops navigation (jump from stop to stop) and a link to the Campus Map.


Feedback is crucial b/c as of now there are only two people involved in this huge project. Thanks so much for your suggestions. I'm sure things will change over time and I'm perfectly fine with all that.

Feel free to check out my madness before I was brought back down to earth 1-7.
http://dev.webadmin.ufl.edu/~akirby/vt/comps/

"If someone is on a page, there's no context to orient them to what they are looking at, what to expect or why its important." - cschoaf

The Flash intro animation will be very short and quick and will display a title of sorts to let folks know what tour stop/section they are on.

Thanks for your suggestions... We'll take them into serious consideration.

Will do. Thanx for the feedback.

Al, I think that if you take in the suggestions from the groups yesterday (adding a call to action button, pulling the Tour Stops and Campus Maps out of the J Query and placing it underneath the movie, etc), this is ready for prime-time (providing TPTB approve moving forward).

Bferraro no link in your post. Are you possibly referring to http://960.gs/ ?

All,
I'd like to present the rough mock up of the V.T. site project (almost in it's entirety). I would really appreciate your feedback and suggestions. I've incorporated a few of your suggestions, but I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around the "call to action" button. Can you be more specific as to what "calls to action" we should incorporate and where to put them?

None of the content (text) is original (I am not a writer). It's taken from several existing UF sites...
UF home page
Housing
Reitz Union
Gatorzone
etc

My main concern is the content and/or any additional features ya'll may think of. The videos were produced by Gville TV and are out of my hands.

http://test.urel.ufl.edu/vt/

Thanx a bunch,
Al

I'd suggest putting the call to action at the bottom right -perhaps moving the Campus Map to a middle column and making it three column across the bottom. Just a button about wanting to apply and linking to the admissions site.

FYI, I asked my intern to look it over, as he had not seen it before. Everyone worked intuitively for him except for the bull pull-down tab - he didn't even notice it as an option. Just something to look for from other user testing.

I think the interface looks great - clean, polished and it really allows the videos to take center stage.

I agree with jstevens' suggestion of breaking the bottom section into three columns (while maintaining some of that nice whitespace) and putting a link to admissions at the bottom right. You could also put a link below the Campus Map link, styled in a similar way with a similar blurb below it (e.g. "Want to know more about applying? Visit UF Admissions") I'd also suggest that when the "related information" pulldown bar is pulled down, to have an instance of it stay directly below the video, so the user doesn't have to scroll all the way down to collapse that area.

I viewed this in FF 3.5.3 and the videos are *extremely* choppy, with audio dropping out occasionally. I'd say unwatchable for the average visitor (maybe this is something that will be resolved when it's on the live server?) The aspect ratios of the video and of your embedded player appear to be different - the videos seem a little horizontally stretched.

Good job!