This report was the culmination of a four-month project to develop a student-centered information portal at Carnegie Mellon University. Rather than simply redesigning the Carnegie Mellon website, this research aimed to initiate changes allowing undergraduate and graduate students to succeed both academically and socially.

Despite Carnegie Mellon's status as America's "most wired" university, there was a lot of information organized unintuitively or unavailable online. Developing a solution to this problem required a deep understanding of the University. In the course of our research, the team conducted user interviews and focus groups and drew on a number of HCI methods, including Contextual Inquiry and Heuristic Evaluation, to objectively determine the information needs of the student body.

Given the limited time for the project, it was not possible to implement a full information portal in the course of a semester. As a result, the primary goal of the project was to deliver a set of usability and high-level guidelines, called heuristics, which will drive future implementation without dictating creative or technological growth. These heuristics are better solutions since the information problems at Carnegie Mellon are largely organizational. They are also tools to encourage social change and interdisciplinary development:

1. The Information Portal should maintain a sense of global consistency
2. Keep navigation task-based rather than role-based
3. Maintain a strong sense of hierarchy across pages
4. Reduce information overload from email and fliers
5. Create grassroots student and faculty buy-in
6. Coordinate university-wide information sharing