Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Inukshuk Content

December 21, 2005

Design (Web)

I recently read an arti­cle on UIE’s web­site that has got me dream­ing and think­ing. Here is an excerpt:

Inuk­shuk is “the name of stone fig­ures cre­ated by Inuit hunters as guide mark­ers. The hunters arranged the piles of stones in the like­ness of human beings, sig­ni­fy­ing to other hunters that some­one already has passed through and expe­ri­enced their same jour­ney. An inuk­shuk pro­vided reas­sur­ance and empa­thy to oth­ers and alle­vi­ated an Inuit’s fear that they were off the track.”

“In our research [UIE Engi­neer­ing], we’ve seen that, just like the Inuit hunters, users on the web want reas­sur­ance that oth­ers have shared their expe­ri­ences. Many times, users are con­tem­plat­ing impor­tant deci­sions. To under­stand if they are mak­ing the right deci­sion, they often want to go beyond facts. They want to know if it “feels” right.” Read full article

They used the exam­ples of The Uni­ver­sity of North­ern Iowa putting “pro­files” of stu­dents on their site. You can read what it is like to be a stu­dent at this school. This “reas­sures” peo­ple vis­it­ing the site and helps them to con­nect with the expe­ri­ence. I think that it would be huge for us (Cam­pus Cru­sade Inter­net Min­istry) to cre­ate this “inuk­shuk” con­tent for stu­dents con­sid­er­ing sum­mer projects, stu­dents par­tic­i­pat­ing in Student2Student, and poten­tial stu­dent lead­ers to launch new cam­pus min­istries through GodSquad.com.