BrewCrew
Depaul University| Graduate Project
Information Architecture
Year: 2018
BACKGROUND
The Graduate School was in need of person to launch a redesign of their website and once launched, manage the website and improve the UX of their users (prospective students, current students, and faculty). The Graduate School Deans received a lot of feedback about the difficulty to find information and also inaccurate/old information on their website. A goal was set by the Academic Provost (AU Senior Leadership) to launch a new website with an improved UX.
DILEMMA
Users were experiencing poor usability and navigability on the website which produced low engagement results.
OBJECTIVE
The objective was to improve the user experience of visitors on the The Graduate School website. The biggest problem of the The Graduate School website was poor Information Architecture (IA).
MY ROLE
Content Inventory
Information Architecture
Product Management
Content Strategy
Tracking & Analysis
PROCESS
The Graduate School previously worked with a third party vendor to develop the material design of the website before I entered this project. It was evident that not enough attention had been paid to the IA of the website (arguably the largest problem with previous website). My role became to establish the IA of the website with the SMEs (The Graduate School Staff) and users (students) to develop an effective IA for the website. It was imperative to collect the content for the website and collaborate with the developers to make the relaunch a success.
Content Inventory
We created and inventory of all of our webpages.
This allowed us to identify pages that could be consolidated or discarded.
This also allowed us to identify content gaps and make a plan
Information Architecture
Next, we strategized to find the best way to organize our pages to improve the navigation flow of our website. This was a big challenge for the previous website. To start we investigated and observed the navigation and order of pages on aspirational graduate school websites that we found intuitive.
This allowed us to create a closed-group sorting of navigation items. We tested this grouping amongst our office staff (7 participants) to observe how easy it was for them to located items.
After going through this process, we solidified the navigation structure. We wire-framed the organization structure that was used as a deliverable to guide the development team.
Content Gathering
After the Information Architecture was established, it was my responsibility to identify outdated and missing content and gather it for the content required for the website. This required me
to collaborate with Subject Matter Experts to understand the purpose of the content and motivations for users to need this content.
Requirements Gathering and Backlog Maintenance
During this phase, I managed the backlog of requirements for the project and to keep the development team on task. It was also my role to be the liaison between the stakeholders and the development team to be voice of the stakeholders and collect their feedback for changes. We completed the launch crucial requirements in 7-day sprints until we wrapped up the project.
RESULTS
Before
After
The Graduate School directory was launched and within 4 months of the launch we saw an improvement in almost every measure web analytics metric.
Unique Pageviews : 51% increase
Length of visit: 9% increase
Site depth: 10% increase
Decrease in Bounce Rate: 18% decrease