Dive Brief:
- Hope College in Michigan created 15 profiles of prospective, current, and alumni students — as well as parents, faculty, staff, and community members — to drive its user-centered website redesign.
- The composite identities, created with survey and focus group data, helped keep the proper focus at every stage of website development and continue to help everyone connected to website content creation — even after the new site’s launch in August.
- University Business reports the college continues to collect and monitor data about user experiences to support tweaks to the site in between major upgrades, scrapping the old strategy of doing concerted data collection only ahead of overhauls.
Dive Insight:
Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles is another institution that recently overhauled its website, focusing more on visuals and marketing to prospective students through its homepage. University Business reports the institution made fairly drastic changes to content organization with these goals in mind. Both Loyola and Hope made their websites fully responsive to all sizes of mobile devices, reflecting a new standard in the industry. It is simply a fact now that many users want mobile, on-the-go access to website content.
It is critical, however, that institutions do more than transfer the same old content to a responsive design. The University of Oklahoma is among those focusing on what can be called going “authentically mobile,” rethinking content entirely when preparing it for a new platform.