Building a Better Web Enterprise for Colleges and Universities

Architects of the User Experience
Building a Better
University Web Enterprise

2NavigationArts, LLC
Building a Better University Web Enterprise
What is your college or university’s biggest
challenge on the Web?
Too many site stakeholders to make progress
No coherent strategy
Too many messages coming out of a single site
Too many technologies
Other

Content
Unpacking the University Web Experience

Understand your target audiences, their
lifecycles, and how they use your Web site.
Internal Audiences External Audiences
Students and their families Undergrad prospects
Faculty and staff Grad/professional prospects
Engaged alumni Non-degree students
Donors and partners Potential faculty and staff
Disconnected alumni
Potential donors and partners
Visitors and general public
Internal audiences are External audiences are
customer service audiences. prospects and leads.

The vast majority of university Web sites
blend information across these widely varied
audiences, trying to be everything to everyone.

A site that addresses too many divergent
audiences is hard to use.
 Confuses, overwhelms and frustrates users!
 Dilutes messaging meant to engage audiences
 Promotes site abandonment
 Encourages information silos which lead
to redundancy and inaccuracy
 Hinders search and search engine optimization
 Assumes users know exactly what they are looking
for and how to find it

Your Web strategy should align your organization’s
online communication and business goals to your users’
motivations and behaviors.
What’s the best way for a university to accomplish this?

Begin to see your Web enterprise as two sites:
Internal Audiences External Audiences
Portal, intranet, or community .edu persuades and informs
site serves and informs internal external audiences.
audiences.
Consider the business value of optimizing the user
experience – It allows you to serve, inform, and persuade.

.edu site portal site
While separate, the user experience across your
public and portal sites should be consistent and unified.

Content
How to Approach a Unified Web Presence

When considering a unified Web program,
what should your primary goals be?
 Strengthening your online brand identity
 Creating an intuitive, engaging Web presence
 Improving your transaction channels for key constituencies
 Building a site that effectively drives audiences into business
channels and increases conversion
 Centralizing your content management through governance
 Using the Web to facilitate, rather than hinder, information
sharing and content collaboration among stakeholders
 Optimizing resources invested in the Web enterprise

You may be days, weeks, months or years from
your unified Web project, but initiating the following
practices will help you advance toward your goals.

Understand User Experience Best Practices
Practice: Research and understand user experience best practices.
Value: This will help you communicate the business value of
optimizing the user experience.
Where to start: Familiarize yourself with a range of best practice
topics related to web strategy, online information management and
content strategy, interaction and interface design, technical and
organizational governance models, and usability research.
Recommended resources:
Boxes and Arrows, http://www.boxesandarrows.com
UseIt, http://www.useit.com

Evaluate Your Web Brand Signal
Practice: Evaluate the consistency and strength of the university
brand across your web enterprise.
Value: This will help you understand how your business units use
the web for branding and the types of brand signals your users
confront.
Where to start: Surf your site and collect brand signals into a web
brand inventory. Use this tool to define your current brand approach:
Is it consistent or flexible? Controlled or decentralized? How many
brands are there? Are these brands in content or design?
As best as possible, evaluate your brand against the university’s
strategic goals and its key competitors.
Use your inventory to answer the question: How do we improve the
strength of our university’s web brand signal?

Survey the Competitive Landscape
Practice: Perform a comparative analysis of current and aspirational
competitor sites and regularly monitor the most effective sites.
Value: This will help you know the competitive landscape and
understand how other universities are using the web to support their
business areas.
Where to start: Evaluate your competitors’ sites for:
 Content
 Design
 Usability
 Brand Strength
 Brand Consistency
Use your findings as a benchmark for your own web strategy.

Crunch the Numbers
Practice: Evaluate your site analytics, search data, and server logs
for trends and insights.
Value: This data is evidence of where and how your web site is
meeting user needs or falling short.
Where to start: Evaluate your current analytics and use your
findings to make measurable improvements wherever you can, no
matter how small. Over time you can track your results and begin to
build a case for comprehensive user experience improvements.
Things to evaluate:
 Top search terms
 Most and least popular pages
 Key points of abandonment

Log and Analyze Your Content
Practice: Complete a content inventory and analysis.
Value: The only way to know how to improve your site is to
understand it from a user’s perspective. By completing a content
inventory and analysis, you will fully understand how your
organization’s silos are enacted through your website.
Where to start: Start from the homepage. Navigate hierarchically
and laterally to understand the relationships among content. Look
for content that is ROT (redundant, outdated or trivial). Track your
findings and your progress.
This exercise will help you empathize with and appreciate your
users’ frustrations. It will also help you begin to brainstorm a new,
more efficient model for your web site.

Focus on User Research and Usability Testing
Practice: Conduct research to better understand your users.
Value: This research provides concrete evidence for how your users
find and consume information on your site.
Where to start: Get started with research sessions and employ
practices such as focus groups, individual interviews, usability tests
and surveys to help you understand how audiences are using your site.
Effective user research activities:
 Card sorting
 Paper prototyping
 Group brainstorming
 Usability testing

Know Your Content Contributors
Practice: Talk with various university stakeholder groups to better
understand where they’re coming from.
Value: You will begin to engage your business stakeholders as
partners in your cause.
Where to start: Hold cross-departmental collaboration sessions to
understand your stakeholders’ requirements, concerns and thoughts.
Identify and track key themes and points of consensus.
Goals for stakeholder interactions:
 Opening communication channels with your colleagues
 Tracking how stakeholder requirements change over time
 Enabling stakeholders to take ownership over improving the Web
 Beginning to break organizational silos for “the greater good”

Know Your Technical Infrastructure
Practice: Evaluate your technical infrastructure to identify any
requirements, considerations or important challenges to implementing
an enterprise-wide architecture.
Value: This will help you understand the universe of processes and
applications that exist across your Web enterprise, and the users and
business stakeholders related to each.
Where to start: Work with your Web technology group or groups
to understand the Web lifecycle. Analyze how the Web site directly
and indirectly serves customers and prospects along their lifecycles.
Questions to ask:
 How many Web accounts exist and how are they used?
 What is the content management infrastructure?
 What are the key points of integration (application, business, etc.)?

Content
Now that you’ve done all this work, put it to work for you.
Use your findings to create a roadmap for a unified
Web enterprise you and your University can be proud of.

Questions?
info@navigationarts.com
703-584-8920
http://www.navigationarts.com
Please be in touch with any questions you may have.

Building a Better Web Enterprise for Colleges and Universities

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