Conducting Research in Preparation for Redesigning the University Website

The first step to redesigning the university’s website was research — as much as we could within our timeline and budget.

I was primarily responsible for the foundational research that would guide our information architecture and content strategy. I was grateful to have the help of a colleague with more experience than me in analytics who helped gather a lot of data regarding our existing website, and gain access to some industry reports and whitepapers.

With a bit of an academic background, it made the most sense for me to write a “research paper” to collect and organize my thoughts. I structured this paper loosely like this:

• A “literature review” based on industry research on higher education marketing websites
• An assessment of the current university’s website ecosystem 
• An in-depth review of the university website

Reviewing Industry Research

Working with our recruitment marketing team, I gained access to several whitepapers related to higher education recruitment from sources including Advance Education, RNL, EAB, Carnegie and CollegeXpress. These reports tended to look at more than just websites as part of the recruitment funnel, including channels such as direct email marketing and social media. I was also able to compare the insights from these recruitment reports from results from our university’s non-matriculating student survey.

Looking specifically at higher education websites, we invested in Nielsen Norman Group’s “University Websites: Strategies for Optimizing Usability on College and University Websites.” This 200+ page report contained incredibly helpful insights that informed several aspects of the new university website’s information architecture and impacted elements of our design system, Aggie UX.

I used the general information about recruitment trends and prospective student expectations combined with specific insights on higher education websites to create a foundation from which to look at the existing university website. 

Assessing the University’s Website Ecosystem

The largest aspect of assessing the university’s website ecosystem came in the form of an audit. Prior to kicking off the university website redesign project, I spent four months inventorying and assessing as many university websites as I could find.

This website inventory focused on finding as many unique websites as possible that were presented as being owned and operated by the university. For my purposes, a “unique website” had its own navigation and usually a unique URL based on a subdomain of the university’s domain (i.e., example.tamu.edu).

I collected basic information for each site as part of the inventory, but we also assessed brand compliance and accessibility to get a baseline understanding of the holistic web experience across university websites. While we were able to use our automated accessibility scanning tool to collect baseline data for each website cataloged, assessing brand compliance required having humans look at each website’s home page and give it a score.

Assessing Brand Compliance

To get a quantitative overview of brand compliance, we created a grading matrix that measured three key aspects to visual brand compliance: proper use of logos, brand colors and fonts. Each of these three areas had four possible scores (unacceptable, needs modification, acceptable, and excellent) with associated criteria and point values. Logos were weighted the highest, followed by use of brand colors and use of brand fonts.

Within this grading schema, a website that had “acceptable” use of university logos, colors and fonts would be graded as a “B” with 80 points, while websites that excelled in each area were graded as an “A.”

While brand compliance is by nature subjective, this process allowed us to have multiple people to assess websites’ brand compliance as consistently as possible.

Reviewing the University’s Website

When looking specifically at the university website, I looked at as much information as I could get my hands on. I combined data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMRush with observable data I was able to collect myself.

From a purely content perspective, I audited the pages on the university website and reviewed their content for purpose. I was also able to compare the university website to other websites within the university’s ecosystem, to see how their content was related. This audit paired with looking at high-value keywords (like “application,” “apply” and “directory”) across university websites was very revealing. 

For example, on this iteration of the university website, the content goal was to be a “soft handoff” to other university websites. We could clearly see this because the university website was relatively small (129 pages) with 40% of that being emergency information. Looking at the content, there was less information available directly on the university website, and instead the content focused on linking you out to other websites (including 224 on the university domain, such as individual college websites). With so much high-value information being distributed on other university websites, we were seeing keyword competition with ourselves, sometimes for the same information that was being replicated across sites.

After looking at the content in context, I reviewed which pages were the most and least popular by looking at Google Analytics. I also reviewed the top user searches within the university website to try to identify what content users were hoping to find on the site. In addition to looking at these metrics, we analyzed user journeys based off of users self-identifying as a user group by using the persona-based navigation. Looking at these aspects helped us theorize ways we could improve the information architecture and user experience through the website redesign.

Reviewing the university website’s search engine optimization (SEO) was also incredibly informative. Looking at what people were searching for when they ended up coming to the university website, how many search impressions the university website got over the course of a year, and what keywords it ranked for helped inform our content strategy, information architecture, and our search and quick links navigation elements. Data from this exercise also helped inspire a future brand campaign!

I also looked at our undergraduate recruitment campaigns and how they interacted with university websites. This was especially important as some of the content the campaigns referred to was content we planned to move to the university website.

Next Steps

After conducting this research, I shared what I learned to the project team through a series of workshops. We used these workshops to structure our efforts, brainstorm solutions and keep forward momentum. Ultimately we were able to publish the new site — complete with brand new information architecture, written content, and design — by the end of the year.