We recently poured over countless research documents in search of the golden ticket to what makes a higher ed website effective for prospective students. We are fairly certain there is no ONE golden ticket, we’ve searched high and low and know we would have found it by now. See, websites for colleges and universities aren’t as straightforward as they might seem. In just one site you are talking to ALL of the following people:
- Prospective students that are deciding whether to consider your institution.
- Current students that are currently attending your institution and need to easily and readily find information about services, procedures and activities.
- Alums who have a special connection to the institution.
- Faculty and Staff who have to either complete the business functions of the college online or promote their office or service to one of the other audiences listed above.
Maybe there are four golden tickets? All of these audiences are important, but, let’s just focus on one at a time. We started with the audience who does not yet know us. How do we readily provide them information that they are looking for that will give them a clear picture of Stonehill? What do they want to know and how do we provide them an image and sense of who we are and what we do best?
You’ll be interested to know that:
- Almost 1/2 of prospective students and parents will take a school off it’s list if they have a bad experience on the website.
- 80% feel content is more important than design.
- 1/2 of prospective students looked at a campus website on a mobile device.
Take a peek at some more of the interesting data that rose to the top regarding prospective students expectations of a website in our presentation.
We continue to think of all of the audiences as being critically important. That is why we’ve decided to include audience-specific gateways in the information architecture of our new website. Each audience comes to the site with a different need and will be interested in different content. If they can easily self-identify, the most engaging and relevant content will be at their fingertips.
We are continually exploring the needs of each audience and how to develop a cohesive and engaging site for each.
August 7, 2012 at 4:32 pm
In my previous job I atenedtd User Requirement Meetings, in person and webcast. I had to know what my group needed (information wise) and how they wanted to see it on the screen. I had to go back and forth between my team and our developers to make sure they were designing for our needs and not out of some box they already owned. We constantly re-evaluated our needs, internally, and as we rolled out certain screen rights to our customers, we re-evaluated their needs. It was a very rare case when all development stopped on a program. That meant the death of it and repeating this over again with another manufactuer and writing the code over again. There would never have been a way to create and roll-out a program without data gathering, measurement tools, evaluation levels, and room for growth.