University of Denver Re-design: Find A Degree

Preview our concept of how to find a degree.

University of Denver Re-design: Audience Tour

Preview our concept behind segregated audiences.

The New Site In A Nutshell

At its most basic level, the new du.edu site will revolve around who visits the site. As you might imagine, every person who visits our site has a particular task or set of tasks they wish to accomplish. What this allows us to do is group the people with similar tasks into broad audience types.

For example, many site visitors want to earn a degree- psychology, law, marketing, etc. We can group these people together and call them "prospective students". Using the same logic, we come up with a handful of other audience types all categorized around a group's shared needs and wants. Other audiences could include current students, university employees, alumni and news media. These categories allow us to tailor the site to each audience's needs without the burden or baggage of wading through information that isn't relevant to them. Does a prospective student need to be presented with university employee work policies? No. This system allows us to sidestep this problem.

If we continue with our prospective student example group, we can subdivide them even further based on other tasks, needs and wishes. Through our research, we find that undergraduates want information on their degree program of choice and also a sense of what the university is like outside the classroom- the social scene, activities, housing, and the physical surroundings (both campus and the larger backdrop of Denver and the mountains). Graduate students also want extracurricular information, but their focus is more academically based (research opportunities, faculty, program requirements and rankings, alumni information, etc.).

You begin to see how the site can be organized around needs rather than, as is currently the case, how the university is organized. This approach personalizes the site's content around the visitor's goals. They no longer have to navigate their way through hierarchical levels of schools, colleges, divisions and departments which they don't understand as a non-DU member. Instead, the new site will drive visitors to their program of interest quickly and easily and, once there, surround them with information pertinent to that program instead of having to go to other sites for relevant information.

Video Discussions

Our group will present a series of videos to explain various aspects of the new website under development. Each video will tackle a single topic so that feedback and discussions can be focused within the comments area. Our first video will discuss how we handle different audience groups and why we separate them.

Each video will show a prototype of the site as it exists at that point in time. The design will likely change over time to reflect what we learn from testing our ideas and incorporating feedback from DU staff so listen to the concepts and ideas presented instead of concentrating on how something looks. We'll also have videos concerning design matters, but those videos will explicitly state that in the beginning.

Student Feedback on the New Site

The slideshow we've created provides an overview of the new site's core idea. In order to verify whether it will work, we enlisted the help of students. Through a series of focus groups and one-on-one tests of our prototype, we will confirm whether or not the idea will work.

We have already begun to elicit feedback from students and, on the whole, responses have been positive. Below are some quotes we've gotten:

• About finding a program of study: "That was pretty easy."
  
• About finding a program of study: "It wasn't difficult."
  
• "All the information I need ... is right on the front page."
  
• About a sample admissions page: "Admissions requirements checklist- that's perfect."
  
• After finding program of study information: "That's actually a good approach" and "Yeah, I feel this is a better approach."
  
• "I definitely like this layout a whole lot more than how it is right now."
  
• "I like it. It doesn't feel to busy, but there's all the information you need on it."

Overview of DU's New Website Concept

This is the presentation we gave to the website sub-committee which will oversee this project. The reaction from them was positive so we'll move forward with the concept.

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