When we see a website for the first time and describe it as a _good_ site, what we mean is we find it an _attractive_ site. The design elements influence our judgment and distract us from the underlying issue of how well the content is serving the visitors.
When Rutgers-Camden began to identify goals it could accomplish with a redesign, it employed an exercise called 30 Questions. The exercise set out a series of tasks for participants to accomplish on the web site and recorded what they found along the way. It successfully separated the site’s content from its design and identified specific issues that could be addressed as part of a redesign.
This talk describes how the exercise worked, presents some of the more interesting findings and explains how the 30 Questions exercise can be adapted and applied to any type of website.