Overhauling a website as large and complex as WashU Olin’s takes time. Long before starting to build a new site, we need to take time and step back to understand the current state, evaluate market trends, reassess customer needs and evaluate technology offerings.
And with our industry-trusted partner BarkleyREI, Olin’s marketing and communications team did just that. For a little more than a year—from July 2021 to September 2022—we followed a tried and true process that looked something like this:
- Discovery: We held stakeholder meetings with senior leadership, external partners, admissions and recruiting, information technology and current students. We did this to hear what matters most, understand the unique differentiators of our school, and determine what works and what needs improvement. We learned a lot, including that our navigation and site architecture was not intuitive and too complex. We also found we could do more to better tell the school’s story and that we were a little too wordy.
- Competitor audit: We reviewed 20-plus competitive websites to confirm standards, understand what others were doing well and gather informed opinions. From this process, we took note of improvements we wanted to include to better tell Olin’s story through its people—improvements such as a more modern visual style, compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, a more robust program finder and clearer calls-to-action.
- Content audit: We commissioned an audit of the content throughout our complete website (olin.wustl.edu) and a deep-dive, one-year traffic analysis to understand ways to improve user journeys.
- Student survey and card sort: We had more than 100 first-year students from all programs give feedback on what mattered to them and what information they looked for when deciding on a school. We then had them group information into areas or buckets that made sense to them.
- Site-tree testing: With an informed site architecture from our previous steps, we needed to verify our findings. The primary goal of site-tree testing is to discover whether users will be able to easily travel through our proposed site. We accomplished this by having more than 100 users try to accomplish specific tasks within the confines of a given site architecture and labels. Simply put, we want to make sure we are speaking our customers’ language and placing information in areas where it makes sense. We assessed this by creating time-to-completion and success rates of tasks.
These key items were among the recommendations that informed our information architecture:
- Tell your story: Communicate brand identity and culture with strategic storytelling (e.g., profiles and videos) and amplify research and experiential initiatives in our news coverage of the school.
- Consolidate pages/encourage exploration: Streamline academic pages and content for a more intuitive experience and create on-page opportunities to explore related content with clear calls to action.
- Think mobile: Have navigation and content that works on desktops and mobile. There is not enough real estate on mobile phones to develop intricate page layouts. Users want content. Serve it up to them easily—no matter what device they are on.
- Improve website search: Different users employ different ways to find the content they want. Make all ways as usable as possible.
- Bring the news/blog into the limelight: Make sure users can intuitively find what they need, but make sure they see relevant current happenings during their journey.
Be on the lookout for our next update in a few weeks. We’ll cover the importance of a mobile-first design and how we aim for more (and quicker) actions on our new website.