Product Design + Research + Collaboration



CASE STUDY

UB’s Research Based Transformation 

Transforming a university’s digital communication strategy

The planning pages that were developed from the research work.

As part of the core team of the University at Buffalo’s Digital Communication Transformation I was involved with defining and instantiating a process that would serve as the model for the university’s online presence.

Working with an internal team of stakeholders and subject matter experts, alongside industry experts mStoner and Indi Young, we researched and formulated a process to understand business needs, audience needs, the available content and the content that was still needed.

My main contribution on this project was to serve as the lead interface designer and to contribute to and apply the findings from this initial research and discovery to the UI. For more on my application of these findings, you can see my case study on web management.

Planning the plan

When I first sat down to write this case study, I started off by outlining the steps of the process: auditing, modeling, info architecture, etc, but I would be remiss not to mention the book Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works by the incredible team of Emily Cotler and Kelly Goto. This book, first published in 2002, was crucial in developing the timeline, creating the benchmarks and insuring the success of this project.

Business guidance

The business guidance portion of this process was very important in onboarding and ensuring buy-in from the key stakeholders. This allowed the organizations to create a baseline of what their business needs were and to set their own expectations. Later on in the process we would match these needs against user needs and fill the gaps (or, sometimes build the bridges) in order to satisfy both.

This white paper from one of the project participants, gives a sense of the depth of the organizational information we were gathering before starting on the user-based research. 

Content audit

Many times when restructuring a communication, particularly when it comes to the seemingly infinite space of online communications, site owners will simply want a rewrite of the existing content. As part of our process, it was important to conduct a thorough inventory of an entire site and have the owner(s) determine an appropriate action: keep, revise, or remove.

By creating a content auditing template that kept the reviewer focused on the recommended actions of keep, revise, or remove, we were not only successful at getting the needed content, but we also validated that the content was purposeful.

An example of the Content Audit template. While this process is primarily to reduce content rot, the information here will also inform the content gaps that may be seen in the next part of the process of mental modeling.
 

Mental models

Under the tutorship of Indi Young, a pioneer in ethnographic research applied to digital communication, I took part in training to conduct and transcribe 50 non-directed interviews of people from various backgrounds. The content of which we combed to obtain a data set on key user needs and tasks. This formed the basis of our mental models.

An excerpt from the Match Seeker mental model showing a “tower pattern” concerning the verb-based grouping “Look At All My Options”. The top half of the model groups user tasks by common goals and themes. The bottom half represents our content gap analysis, which helped us understand where our existing content addressed specific user needs and what new content needed to be created.

Information architecture

With the existing content cleaned up in the audit stage, and the needed content identified in the gaps of the mental models, the next stage of the process was to outline all of the content via the Information Architecture.

OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle were used for the info architecture, allowing us to take advantage of the drag-and-drop capabilities as well as the wire flow views (based on hierarchy of the Link IDs…I don’t recall but we may have had to write a specific script to achieve this). 

Content strategy

Using the information synthesized from the mental models and structured by the information architecture, we then got content authors and subject matter experts thinking about their site’s content in terms of their audiences. While these segmentations act as a guide to behavior and context, they are not exclusive. In other words, you’ll find an audience segment that may exhibit the behavior of a Match Seeker, but that acts as a Pulse Taker at certain times of the year. The content and UI needs to accommodate for these shifts.

UB’s primary audiences*

Match Seekers

Individuals who are evaluating UB or a working relationship within UB to see if it’s the “right fit,” including prospective students and faculty members.

Prideful Belongers

People who feel a special bond with UB or your department and are looking to connect or reconnect, like alumni, current students, faculty and staff.

Active Supporters

Those who are looking for opportunities to or currently support UB’s success through volunteering, advocacy, leadership, and financial support. 

*Secondary audiences included Pulse Takers and Solution Seekers. For more on additional audience segments visit the full documentation site.

What could be seen as an additional step in the process, came from the amazing team at higher education consulting firm, mStoner. This audience matrix aligned the primary audience segments with the key user needs and tasks to ensure all are addressed.

Documentation and Training

At the conclusion of the research, we compiled our findings and got to work on the documentation and training materials that would need to support a successful university-wide effort.

I contributed to much of the training documentation and resource materials on this site, beginning with drafting its initial site architecture and eventually producing and stewarding a significant amount of its content.

I also evangelized the materials – giving talks, leading training classes and scheduling one-on-one guidance for early adopters.

Circling back

A construct for business

As a basic example of how the business needs (via business guidance) mentioned earlier in this writing went on to inform my role as interface design lead, I want to reference the “Fat Footer” construct. An emerging UI pattern at the time – and now a mainstay of large organizations –  this coffee table book of a structure was a lifesaver in terms of satisfying the institutional politics that often get in the way of user needs.

By providing this below-the-fold area for items like funding links and organizational bloat, the user was always presented with the most important content first as determined by the research – all while meeting stakeholder expectations.

Now a mainstay of large organizations, the “Fat Footer” was a lifesaver in terms of satisfying business needs without getting in the way of key user tasks.

Audience-driven page layout

To demonstrate the targeting of the primary audience segments derived from the mental model research, here’s a before and after image of the initial redesign of the main university homepage. Apologies for the low fidelity image, these screen grabs don’t age too well…

Content Positioning – While the core part of the content predominately focused on prospective Match Seekers (M), the content geared toward current Solution Seekers (S) was strategically placed around the search functionality and in the footer as this audience segment was found to be motivated to scroll. For more about the development of the interface, see my case study on web management.

References

In the above examples, I recreated and simplified the information to (hopefully) make it more digestible. For the original examples and templates, see the following references: