The Solution

This project required many skilled professionals. I am indebted to the overall UI provided by our art director, Nicole Rim, and custom theme development from our contracted agency, Floodlight. For the purpose of highlighting my contribution to the success of this project, I want to focus on three connected solutions that unified our fragmented stakeholders around the first stage of a consistent, conversion-focused UX.

1. Personas

I entered the project with top-down buy-in to focus on prospective students at the expense (when necessary) of current students, alumni, faculty, centers, and institutes. Nevertheless, we still had to contend with four campuses and two pseudo-campus programs all functioning as semi-autonomous schools loosely connected by a common name.

Using demographic data researched by our six “campuses,” I developed a series of 30 proto-personas. Admittedly, this overwhelming host of personas was laughably insufficient to unify UX decisions. This was an intentional compromise to allow each of our stakeholders to view their perceived core users. In the process, however, the personas pushed stakeholders to discuss design decisions in terms of user goals. This was the first key success.

“Personas pushed stakeholders to discuss design decisions in terms of user goals.”

2. Data-Driven User Flows

My second key solution was using analytics to demonstrate consistent user flows. Notably, our degree program page — which had two variant URLs — was the single highest destination page for the first, second, and third interaction.

This should not have been a surprise. Our degree page served as the catalog of our primary ‘products.’ Nevertheless, many stakeholders assumed prospective students explored faculty and campuses before diving into programs. The data defied those assumptions. Our prospective students were far more pragmatic than previously believed. This was the second key success.

3. Campus Tabs

My third key solution was to organize the content of pages under a series of tabs related to our four campuses and online modality. On the back end, we created administrative roles mirroring our campuses and gave content owners the ability to edit specific campus sections per page.

This relatively simple UX solution had dramatic implications for the site’s information architecture.

Prior to this, our stakeholders depended on driving users to their specific (campus-based) sub-sites. These sub-sites varied wildly in structure owing to exaggerated misperceptions of the uniqueness of “our users.” This practice was unnecessarily competitive and confusing for users.

The data-driven user flows (above) demonstrated that all stakeholders depended on a common user flow. The tab structure empowered us to drive users through consistent page flows that could be campus-specific or campus agnostic depending on the particular need of a given page.

This also meant that content owners began developing content in parallel (on the same page). Over time, increasingly parallel content allowed us to simplify pages and reduce dependency on the tabs.