STEM School Project REDESIGN
The communication director at the North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM) recognized that there were issues with the the school website beyond aesthetics. She needed solutions to meet the needs of a large number of stakeholders.
We started by trying to understand current state of the website with two surveys. One was for the incoming students, another targeted their parents. I developed the surveys along with the staff of NCSSM. We then conducted in-person and remote interviews with 25 students, staff, and faculty. The data gathered was communicated in six personas like this one below.
Role
User Researcher, Content Strategist
Sample of a persona our team developed for this project
Actions on this project
Stakeholder interviews
User interviews
Survey development
Persona development
Communication plan
Message architecture
Page level content strategy
We also convinced the stakeholders that we should match the information architecture to the mental model of the target audiences we studied. The final website, seen below, streamlined the content. Much content was moved to an internal intranet so that the public-facing website could focus on the needs of prospective parents and students.
Results
“How did you get him to tell you that?! ”
Uncovered what was most important to each group of website users so the NCSSM could develop impactful content
Convinced stakeholders to restrict the public facing website to focus on marketing and moved a significant amount of content internal
Provided two surveys that give baseline metrics to gage website satisfaction
Helped NCSSM gain hundreds of new sign-ups for the school newsletter since the new website launched