Washington University: MBA Program
St. Louis’s premier university, Washington University has been one of the top academic institutions in the United States for years, consistently ranking towards the top of college rankings for undergrad and graduate schools. Despite this, like many universities, their website was difficult to navigate, lacked mobile optimization, and relied too much on rankings to draw students in, while ignoring the user experience of actually learning about and applying to the school. Noticing this problem, the MBA program brought me on in a short term contract role to make the site more mobile friendly, improve the home screen, create a general outline for other landing pages, and generally quickly enhance usability and efficiency.
Overview
Process:
Competitive analysis and design research
Heuristic Evaluation
User research
Stakeholder and user interviews
Site mapping
Sketching
Wireframing,
Lo-fi prototype
Iterating
Role:
As the sole UX researcher and designer associated with this project, my role encompassed all aspects of the process, from conducting the competitive analysis, to interviewing users, to site mapping and prototyping.
Tools:
Pen & paper
Sketch
Craft
InVision
Zoom
Research
Heuristic Evaluation and Analytics Analysis: To start with, I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the site, switching between mobile and desktop views to check on cohesiveness and navigation alignment. Along with some disparities between the mobile and desktop versions, I quickly noted the massive blocks of text that didn’t take into account the different reading habits between paper (more thorough) and screens (greater tendency towards skimming), the confusion between the 3+ layers of navigation within the home screen, and the overuse of floating action buttons (two), taking up considerable screen real estate and covering some essential navigation areas. In conjunction with this, I examined the analytics, looking at page behavior, what devices were being used to look at the site, and where users were coming from.
Competitive Analysis: After conducting the heuristic evaluation, I delved into a competitive analysis, examining the websites of similarly ranked MBA programs such as Carnegie Mellon, the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and Vanderbilt, along with an aspirational program at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. During this I paid particular attention to what information was prioritized, how their navigation and navigation hierarchy was laid out, and how each told their stories.
Interviews: For user research I staked out a coffeeshop near WashU that was known to be a common place for students to study away, but also recognized for being friendlier and more accessible than many other study dens. Here I was able to conduct three user interviews, one a graduate of WashU’s Masters of Accounting program, another with a master’s degree in architecture, and the third being someone who had considered getting an MBA but had eventually opted for another route. Through these interviews I was able to better grasp what potential users prioritized when choosing a grad school, with all interviewed emphasizing outcomes post-grad school being their top need, investment of time/resources (though contradictory to stakeholder desires, since don’t want to turn potential students off due to high costs), and how to apply/what the application process is like.
Ideating
Noticing the difficulty in navigating the MBA program website, I started off by doing a basic navigation from the main page, trying to figure out the necessary hierarchy and how often each link would be needed. I also took the priorities I had gleaned from the above research to better understand how to reconfigure the site layout, and what information would be most beneficial placed towards the top of the page, along with being grouped together. From there, I started doing some basic sketches of how I imagined the site looking, with the more intuitive and basic navigation options.
Wireframes
After ideating, I started reconfiguring the WashU MBA home page, cutting down on heavy and redundant text that potential students often skipped over, instead adding easy to skim bullet-points that focused on recent accolades that the program had received, along with expected outcomes from the program, and student stories. I also brought forward the “Apply” button on desktop, making it more prominent, as the main call to action on the page. Similarly, I simplified the navigation, cutting out redundant links, and moving extraneous links further down or to the footer.