Living at Cornell

Introduction:

Congratulations! You've been accepted to Cornell University. Excitement and uncertainty are certainly two of your first likely emotions. After all, you know it's a great school, but what will your new life be like? Where do you start? Who will you meet? What support will you find when you first arrive? Where will you live? And, oh, what's for dinner?

See More...

• Campus Life Dining

  Where dining is not just a meal...it's a pleasure!

• Campus Life Housing

  Your new home! Options for living on campus.

• CU Campus Life

  Creating an exceptional living and learning environment.

• Living at Cornell

  Welcome to Cornell's living and learning communities.

As a prospective or newly admitted student Cornell's Department of Campus Life helps take the uncertainty out of your arrival. Campus Life is committed to creating an exceptional living and learning environment for students and the greater Cornell community.

Dedicated staff work to foster a strong positive connection with students even before arrival on campus. This connection includes the Living at Cornell brochure and companion web site. Filled with useful information about housing and dining options, residential support services, faculty involvement, community centers, and application information. These publications not only provide you with the information you need to start your life at Cornell, but will also engage you in Cornell life with photos, videos, and panoramas of the Cornell experience.

Project Goal:

Build an engaging, interactive companion web site to the Living at Cornell brochure. Strictly replicating a print publication on the web is not enough. The new site should compliment and extend the print publication. The new site must welcome students, engage them, and help them navigate to the Cornell services and information they need. While a print publication is static by nature and limited in physical size, a web site can be dynamic and interactive, and can display or hide content based on viewer preferences.

Here's how we built a site to do just this.

OBA Solution:

• Design: We were very fortunate to work with a talented Cornell designer who developed the print brochure. We were able to base the look of the web site on the design and layout of the brochure to create a coherent and integrated set of communications. The challenge for us was to integrate the graphic design elements and images from the brochure with more dynamic features to engage the students. A great example of this is the slide show on the site's home page.
  
  
• Slide Shows: Information is primary. Students want to be able to find out how to apply for housing, for dining, but they also want something less tangible... what is life at Cornell going to be like for me? The slide shows, with views of student activities, dorm rooms, dining halls, and campus scenic images, help the student visualize her new life at Cornell.
  
  
• Videos: The slide shows are great, but Campus Life goes even further by including videos. As part of the new design we created space for and embedded videos of Cornell life, special dining events, and videos from the CU in the Kitchen series.
  
  
• Look Inside: The "Look Inside" feature allows students to enlarge thumbnails found almost everywhere on the site. The enlargements show even more detail of dining events, guest speakers like Bill Nye, the incredible variety of food on offer in the dining halls, and photos of all the residence halls. But we didn't stop there...
  
  
• Panoramas: Want to know what the inside of a typical one, two, or three person room looks like? No problem. The residence hall page includes panoramas of each, helping take some of the mystery and uncertainty out of a new student's arrival on campus.
  
  
• Where? So, as a student I can see videos, images, and panoramas of all these great dining halls and residence halls, but Cornell is a big place. Where are all these places? Having the name and address of a place certainly helps, but even better is to be able to see at a glance where a place is - on a map - and in relation to the rest of the campus. For this we developed a dynamic, interactive Google map that students can use to locate each dining hall, residence hall, all the West Campus House system residences, and even the cooperative residences. The map displays markers for each and the table below the map can be expanded or collapsed, allowing the student to hide or show place information (and map markers) as they please. This feature is great for narrowing in on just the information the student needs. And once a place is found, the information bubble attached to the marker provides location and contact information as well as a link to a relevant web page with more information.

This web site was designed to introduce new students to living at Cornell and to help them connect with Cornell. Designing and developing this web site was a tremendous amount of fun, which is nice for me of course, but more importantly, the site is useful, informative, and engaging for new students.