//Back to work.

Virginia Tech

// Launch Site

Virginia Tech determined in 2006 that it was time for a website overhaul. They were just starting to roll out the "Invent the Future" brand promise, and needed the website to better portray the brand online.

Like many large universities, Virginia Tech serves a wide variety of audiences beyond traditional undergraduate and graduate students. One of their major goals was to do a better job of serving each of these audiences.

After a national search they selected NewCity (yes we are in their back yard) to lead them through this process. We began our user research by interviewing 6-8 people from each audience and developing a set of “mental models” describing the goals and tasks each audience was trying to accomplish. We learned this methodology from Indi Young (read her book) and were the first to apply it in the higher education sector. Up until this point, there were few examples of any rigorous audience research being done to guide website strategy for colleges and universities.

In addition to the mental models, we led KJ brainstorming sessions with various departments on campus to shape their content strategy. We attended each website steering committee meeting and gave presentations on campus to groups of faculty and staff to explain the research and plans arising from it.

Our research led to several insights that have since become best practices for higher ed websites. These are just a few relating to students and parents:

  • Prospective students want to get straight to your list of majors and minors. They have no clue about your college and department structure, and they shouldn't have to. We put "Majors A-Z" right on the home page.
  • Distance from home is always an important factor in a student's choice.
  • Sense of place is very important - if someone hasn't been to the campus before, they want to know what it looks and feels like. We added big panoramic photos of the campus in several places.
  • Students want to see photos of real dorm rooms.
  • Students and parents need to be able to very quickly understand a ballpark idea of tuition and fees. We added "Tuition & Financial Aid" to the main navigation, and put a concise cost summary on the first page.
  • Social life and night life is an important priority for students. Most universities didn't address this at all in 2006.
  • Students want to know what the surrounding community is like. At the time Virginia Tech just linked to the Town of Blacksburg site, which wasn't really designed for students. We added a"Life in Blacksburg" section.

Following the audience research, we built a wireframe prototype of the site and conducted several rounds of usability tests, refining the prototype each time. We designed a look and feel for Virginia Tech that complemented their brand in print, and created a comprehensive template framework which they integrated into their CMS.

The site has been a tremendous success, garnering awards, praise and even imitation (it was copied for a Hogwarts fan site). Virginia Tech has seen significant increases in applications and enrollment in the years since, although we can't take all the credit for that. The Office of University Relations has a fantastic web team that has continued to innovate on the foundation we laid together in 2006. They are currently planning a redesign of the site to develop mobile-friendly responsive templates.

In the years since the launch of the main VT site, we have developed websites, web applications and internet marketing campaigns for a number of other groups on campus including:

Related Articles

[ October 5 2007 ]

How VT Financial Aid rebuilt their site around audience goals

VT Financial Aid Web SiteIn an earlier post I wrote about how we have adapted the KJ Method for getting consensus on site architecture. We used this approach extensively when we worked with various administrative and academic departments at Virginia Tech, to revamp their parts of the overall vt.edu site. The people in the Financial Aid office did a great job rethinking their site during our session, and I wanted to share their story.

The IT team from Financial Aid had been maintaining the web site up until this…

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"The most important thing is that we both agreed (and that's why we went with NewCity) that we needed to think about the user first in our approach. 

I think the most valuable things that we did in those early stages of the project were: 

1. The research – seeing what the traffic patterns were on the website and agreeing on what were the most important areas of the website that we wanted to point people to 

2. Actually getting out and talking face to face with members of key audiences, and learning from their perspective how they use the Virginia Tech website and university websites in general, and specifically they were looking for.

The great thing about working with NewCity was the constant communication ...every step of the way we were never in the dark about where you guys were in the development of different ideas. We really were on the same page every step of the way."

- Mike Dame, former Director of Web Communications at Virginia Tech