We constructed personas from our user's self-introduction and put them on the board. Each personas represent a set of requirements. Having these personas would keep our project on track and focused on the user's goal.
Directions:
We speculated our user's need for direction service. This was justified with the later talk to the user; they would want to find places around the iSchool. Where's Dr.Joshi's office? Any coffee shop around here? In terms of places in the building, a simple direction like "Go to 7th floor, on the right" would just do. In terms of places around campus, a simple map and some description would be OK.
"The limited time the user have at the lobby would probably negate interactivity, user would like the info pushed to them. Bang, here's a research talk. Bang, here's a musical. Bang, here's some nice place around the campus."
And we have some new designs for research talks list, just to give a clear layout and separate time the title.
"Push to me" also applies to jobs information. Display available jobs first. If the user is interest, let him/her seek the information.
Another way to layout the posts is to simply lay them out on the screen, without the distinction of faculty or office. Title and content will tell. In the backend, adding different tags to blog posts instead of maintaining two blogs.
News and Events have short content. We can simply display them all on the screen, instead of let the user drill down.