RUNNING HEAD: Redesign of the Unicode Consortium 1

Redesign of the Information Website for Unicode: Unicode Consortium

University of Kentucky
John Flynn, Yuhan Long, Ashley Mattingly, Jennings Pipes, Joseph Steigerwald
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The internet is a place where many people got to find information about different topics.

Some of the websites made to communicate information, such as The Unicode Consortium, have

a low-quality design that can distract from the content. The Unicode Consortium is a website

made to inform people about the Unicode project, a project made to standardize all computer

translating code, so when you travel across the world with your computer, you dont see a bunch

of boxes instead of words. The website, however, does a poor job of communicating information

design wise. Its layout is distracting and looks bland to read. Its navigability is minimal due to

problems with the changing and disappearing navigation bar. Though the cost can be quite high

to change this, it is important to fix the website to increase the usability of it to help people

understand the Unicode project and adopt its usage.

The layout of the website is not ideal. The front page, as shown in figure 1, lacks a

heading. It doesnt tell you where

you are unless you read the small

paragraph at the top of the page.

Potentially, we can create a heading

that says Welcome to the Unicode

Consortium, or a similar phrase to

Figure 1. Front page of the Unicode Consortium at
show the audience where they are. Unicode.org.

The banner and releases bar are too far up and distract from the attention from the fact that this is

the front page and not a random subpage. For the most part, making the font of the introductory

paragraph a bit bigger and adding a bit of whitespace should be able to push the banner and links

down below the page break. This will not only make the front page be more like a front page, it

will also make the website more attractive.

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When you travel to the subpage What is Unicode, as in figure 2, the navigation bar

from the front page disappears. This happens in other pages too, as when you travel to the

General Information page, the

navigation bar becomes a totally

different navigation bar. It is

important to keep the navigation bar

consistent to make sure users dont

get lost. The subpage also changes

the Unicode Consortium at the top of the page to General Information which can make users

confused. This occurs on other pages

too as shown in figure 4. This is

another thing that should be kept

consistent. The translations should

be moved to a drop-down menu at

the top right of the page. This allows the user to still be able to access translations in an easy

manner. When you go to another

language, you can only get back

to the English version, and not

directly to another language, this

would also be fixed with the

language bar. A nice quality of

life improvement would be to

Figure 4. Changes in the navigation bar at Unicode.org.
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add the image in the English version to other languages, as it disappears as shown in the

simplified Chinese version in Figure 3.

Color-wise, the website is very simple as it uses black text on a white background with

red links scattered throughout and red bars to add some design to the mix. The overall color is

fine, but it would help if the links

were blue instead of red as some

users that are not as tech savvy

may not figure out the red Figure 2. What is Unicode? page of the Unicode
Consortium at Unicode.org.
underlined words are links. The

font is Calibri, which is a bit

Figure 5. Frequently Asked Questions page of the
overused and makes the website Unicode Consortium at Unicode.org.

boring. It does not help that most of the website is filled with walls of text that make it feel like

the user is reading an essay rather than an information outlet. There should be two fonts, a serif

font, such as Sitka Display, for titles

Figure 3. What is Unicode? page of the Unicode
and subtitles and a sans serif font, Consortium in simplified Chinese at Unicode.org.
such as Candara, for the text. The variation in fonts will make the website more attractive to

read. The title will be grab their attention and the text wont feel as much like a high school

essay. There needs to be more white space for the pages as the single-spacing paragraphs makes

the pages feel very cramped. This creates walls of text that are not appealing to read, which is

bad for a supposed information website. There can be more white space around the titles of each

subpage. The paragraphs can have more spacing between them to help the reader take a break.

The pages are like the pages What is Unicode? (figure 2) and Frequently Asked Questions

(figure 5) which lack a navigation bar to get back to where you want to be.
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The General Information page, as in figure 6, is very much like the What is Unicode?

page, but has a different set of problems. Getting to the page was not clicking general

information in the side bar, but

clicking one of the drop downs,

which you would expect to lead you

to a different page. The information

in the drop down instead leads you

to the general information page Figure 6. General Information page of the Unicode
Consortium at Unicode.org.
where the information is listed in a

document like format. This should be changed so that those links give separate small easier to

read pages that arent blocks of text. Another very convoluted way of getting there is by clicking

the What is Unicode? page and then going to the top of the page and clicking general

information. This should not be a way to get to general information, but should be a way to get

back to the front page. Instead the way to get to general information should be through the

navigation bar. This will overall just make the whole website a bit more intuitive to use. The

general information page feels more like a front page then the front page, it may just be a good

idea to make general information the front page and removal the need to have a separate front

page. The social media links, instead of the typical thumbnails, are linked words. This is not very

intuitive for many users. That can be fixed by adding in linked icons.

This website has tremendous potential however the redesign will not be on the cheap

side. Due to the tremendous amount of traffic that will be coming from around the world, it

should be redesigned in order that people around the world can successfully understand and

navigate the many layers of this rather large site. The redesign would cost around ten thousand
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dollars give or take a few grand. This may seem outrageous, however due to the large size and

the very specific need of it to cater to several different cultural groups as well as the necessity of

custom plugins. In addition to the first time costs, I would also recommend that the company be

kept on to maintain the site as well as ensure everything is running smoothly and being kept to

standard.

Normally, one would not view an informational website such as this as a target of high

class hackers, however it is a common place for computer programmers and coders alike to visit.

That makes it more vulnerable due to the ability of each of those users to compromise the

website as a practical joke if they wished. There are a few security measures that can be taken to

ensure the safety of the website. The fist is to ensure the validity and detail of the sites HTML

code. If there are loop holes and flaws in that code the site can be easily infiltrated. The second

point of entry are the servers. If the servers have several ports open it will allow for the entry of

uninvited users. It is for this reason that the website must be run off of secure and locked down

servers.

In summary, throughout the rebuild of this website we plan on tackling the issues of

color, flow. security, and cost analysis. Each subtopic is crucial in the effort to redesign and make

a crucially important website much more user friendly for people of all walks of life and

backgrounds. In the end, we as a group hope that our plans and ideas for the future of the site

bring about a new era of both cooperation and understanding among the coders of the world.
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References

eLink Design. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.elinkdesign.com/

Jenik, A., Rathaus, N., Pearce, B., Magnes, Z., Karimi, H. (2017). Web Security Basics.

Retrieved from http://www.beyondsecurity.com/web-security-and-web-scanning.html

The Unicode Consortium (2017). Retrieved from www.unicode.org

Wong, J. (2017, April 2). Cost To Build A Website 2017 | Our Trials & Experiences. Retrieved

from http://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/cost-to-build-a-website/