This research-driven redesign effort and winner of the 2012 CASE Gold Award lowered the website’s average bounce rate from 75% to 37%, doubled the average time on site, and drove an unprecedented number of website visitors to admissions information.
About this project
This award-winning site greets visitors with a display of news, events, and media-rich features. The site includes tiered navigation focusing on various user segments including: prospective, current, alumni, and donors. Because of the wide variety of visitors to this site, we used both standard ways of segmenting the audiences (audience type by affiliation, task, topic) and the practice of mental modeling to identify primary and secondary audiences.
UB’s homepage redesign won the 2012 Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Circle of Excellence Award for Best Complete Institutional Website.
The University at Buffalo won the top award this year for an impressive, comprehensive rethinking and redesign of its top-level website using ethnographic research on mental models pioneered by Indi Young. The site’s content, architecture, and research-based approach are absolutely award-worthy … Buffalo.edu illustrated that clear process, experimentation, iteration, strategy, and hard work yields results—and top honors.
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