The Background
A university came to our agency for help completing their website redesign. They had an internal developer working on building the staging site who left the university before the website was completed. I was only supposed to engage with the client on a few small tasks, but upon investigation discovered that their current site had no logical information architecture (IA) and that there was no plan to change this. I convinced them that a redesign was the perfect time to resolve these issues, which would lead to a better user experience, conversions and have a positive impact on their search engine performance.
The Problem
For many years, the structure of the university's website ran unchecked. Multiple people within the university were creating pages without any regard to structure. This meant that the site had no discernable hierarchy for users to follow.
Additionally, the former developer had created a navigation menu, but the client was unhappy with it and wanted some guidance.
I was able to provide a scalable structure that neatly organized all existing pages into a logical hierarchy, then create a navigation based on the most critical pages for the universities audience.
Target Audience
- New and incoming students
- Parents
- Faculty and staff
- Alumni
The Constraints
This project had a multitude of constraints from the very beginning. For one, we were working off someone else’s design with no background or context. Secondly, the project was only 7 weeks and a very small budget, and my services were a tiny fraction of this budget.
However, the main constraint I find when working with universities is the politics, and this site was no different. When designing the navigation, I tried to find the simplest route to the most common tasks the target audiences would need; however, many additional elements had to be added and design of the navigation had to be reworked to accommodate certain politics.
The Process
I created a new IA based on competitor research and industry best practices. I used secondary research from Nielsen Norman Group on university website testing they had done to guide my IA since I didn’t have access to any existing research and the timeline prevented me from engaging in an extended research session. However I did plan time to run a tree test with current students and incoming students to test both the former and suggested IA. However, due to COVID-19 we were unable to run the test.
The Outcome
The client and I worked together to create a navigation, and ultimately a scalable structure, for the new website that we felt met user needs while also taking into account university politics. While there are a ton of things I would have liked to do in addition to the IA, I’m happy I was at least able to provide them with a consistent framework that will help them organize and categorize content in a logical way going forward.
Resume