The document discusses redesign goals for a university website to help prospective students. The goals were to define the site's voice and tone, improve navigation, make critical tasks like applying easier, showcase the unique location, and be more authentic. Metrics like application numbers, traffic to key pages, and exit rates improved after the redesign, showing it was successful in achieving the goals.

1. Go for the
Goals
Helping prospective students find what they need,
how they need it—and look good doing it
Emily Mayock
Assistant Vice President, Online & Internal Communications
Case Western Reserve University
emily.mayock@case.edu
Slides: bit.ly/hew-goals

4. PERCEIVE
UNDERSTAND
NAVIGATE
INTERACT
regardless of ability

6. microsoft.com/design/inclusive
For many of us,
finding information
about colleges was
difficult.
For prospective
students today, the
difficulty may lie in
information
overload.

7. So how can
you stand out
to busy,
overloaded
teens,
in a sea of
similar-
seeming
schools?

9. “It’s just so
generic.”

11. Redesign Goals

12. Redesign Goals
• Define and execute voice and tone
• Improve navigation
• Make critical tasks (apply) and information
gathering (tuition rates) easier
• Make the site more visually interesting—
but still easy to update
• Showcase our unique location
• Be more authentic—not generic

13. Measuring Success

14. • Increase unique visits to the homepage by
10%
• Up traffic to the apply page by 10%
• Hold applications steady
• Attract even more academically
accomplished and well-rounded students
• Boost traffic to “schedule a visit” form
• Decrease overall page count
Measuring Success

15. Know Your Audience
Pro tip: It’s not
“everyone."

16. Goals: ✔
Audience: ✔
Authenticity: ❌

20. Use What You’ve Got
Research is time-consuming—but critical. Use
your available resources effectively.
• Tour guides are one of your most helpful assets,
for many reasons
• Find existing research into your audience and use
it; don’t redo valid work for the sake of redoing

21. Boundless
Focused
Inquisitive
Genuine
Gutsy

22. Define and Execute
Tone

25. Who are you, who are you not, and who do you want to be?
• Card-sorting exercises are critical to determine your voice and tone
• Every decision you make in terms of content—words, images, video and
design—needs to reflect these decisions
Goal 1: Define Voice & Tone

26. Improve Navigation

27. Goal 2: Improve Navigation*
*Side effect goal: Decrease page count
Streamline your content!
• Clean house wherever you can,
before you get to reworking.
• Does it have a purpose—and does
it make an impact—where it is? If
not, move, rework or remove.
• Analytics are like a good attorney:
They present the facts to make
your case.

28. How can you rework your content to
actually work?
•Consolidate! We cut our page count by half, finding
better, more prominent places for everything
•By sharing visual, information-filled, topic-driven pages
instead of bland, text-heavy, niche pages, we could
actually give more prominence to the pages that
received little traffic
Goal 2: Improve Navigation*
*Side effect goal: Decrease page count

29. 54
visits to the dining page from
September 2016 to mid-January 2017

30. 1,823
Visits to the housing and dining page from
September 2017 to mid-January 2018

34. Test, Fix, Test Again
User testing is critical.
Remember, you are not
your average user.
• Just because you
understand how to
navigate your site or
operate a feature doesn’t
mean everyone will.
Navigation is meant to
provide a clear path.
• Eliminate excessive links
that splinter your traffic.

35. 17%
of traffic to the apply page, from the homepage
pre-redesign

36. 39%
of traffic to the apply page, from the homepage
post-redesign

37. Make Critical Tasks
Easier

38. Why college students visit your site:
1. Tuition rates
2. Scholarships
3. Programs offered
4. Financial aid
5. Apply
Source: Ruffalo Noel Levitz 2018 E-Expectations Trend Report
Goal 3: Make completing tasks and
finding information easier

41. Goal 3: Make completing tasks and
finding information easier

43. Goal 3: Make
Completing Tasks
and Finding
Information Easier
Again, consolidate. Test.
Accommodate.
• Consolidated multiple
rankings/facts-driven pages
into one
• Students struggled to find
key facts on the old site
• Placement still may not be
ideal—so where else can it
be featured to ensure there
are multiple ways of finding
it? It never hurts to be
helpful.

44. Improve aesthetics
while maintaining
ease of updates

45. Goal 4: Improve Aesthetics While
Improving Ease of Updates for End Users
77%
rated our setup of Drupal as easier or significantly
easier than previous CMS

46. Showcase Location

48. Goal 5: Showcase Our Location
• Urban campus in a park-like setting in Cleveland, Ohio
• In the heart of one the most culturally dense square miles in the U.S.
• Quick walk to the No. 2 hospital in the country, a statewide medical
powerhouse and a VA hospital
• Short car, bus or train ride from downtown

50. Be Authentic

51. Goal 6: Be Authentic
• Defined our voice and tone
• Reworked all content—including images and video
—to make sure it aligned
• Listened to our users to determine what actually
worked for them
• Consolidated and re-architected the site content to
better meet our voice, tone and overall goals
• Shared with prospectives their need-to-know
information that is unique to us—tuition, programs
• Showed our unique campus location

54. So…
did it pay off?

55. 25,379
applications to the Class of 2021 (pre-redesign)
—a record-breaking number!

56. 26,646
applications to the Class of 2022 (post-redesign)
—again, a record-breaking number!

57. 5%
growth in applications, year over year

58. boost in traffic to
Undergraduate
Admissions’ homepage
25%
decrease in exit rates
from the homepage
8%
increase in traffic to the
visit/events section
334%

59. 1,390students:
our largest, most academically accomplished class
in university history

60. emily.mayock@
case.edu
bit.ly/
hew-goals