Background

Along with our partner digital agency Critical Mass, our Integrated Marketing Communications team at Quinnipiac redesigned the university website (QU.edu) and built it on a new CMS (Adobe Experience Manager) in Fall 2016. While the previous website was institution-centric and cluttered with thousands of pages of content that catered to all audiences, the new experience was user-centric and focused on top-level prospective student journeys.

It was time to migrate the existing Parents.QU.edu microsite from our old Ingeniux CMS to our new AEM platform. This way we could keep the design consistent from our new main site to the parent web experience, and eventually look to sunset our old CMS as we moved our other existing web properties to AEM.

Old Site Experience

Issues

The existing parents site experience was a mishmash of pages with no clear message — some pages urged parents to donate to the university without explaining the value of a gift, other pages contained outdated information, and some pages focused on campus offices rather than campus functions (“Bursar’s office” vs. “managing your student finances” or “pay your bill”), piling more frustration and stress on top of an already stressful process. Who actually enjoys paying their tuition bill? Why would we make that task harder and even less enjoyable with institutional jargon?

There were other problems I also had to contend with…

Risks and Challenges

• Unlike most universities, QU does not have one office dedicated to Parents and Families. This leads to…

• Multiple stakeholders across campus with different motivations:

  • Development - Concerned with fundraising

  • Bursar - Wants families and students to pay their tuition bills on time

  • Residential Life - Wants to let parents know about move-in schedules and holiday closings, especially for new students

• Lack of inspiration — Many other universities aren’t doing a great job with their online parents presence either

  • Leapfrog effect: Jumps parents to separate office pages with different designs, leading to an inconsistent and disjointed site experience

  • Important information is buried

Opportunities

I couldn’t just go to the various university offices and inform them that I would be migrating and reorganizing/redesigning their content just for maintenance reasons. I had to establish a business case for why a robust redesign had to occur. Here are a few of the points I brought up — often repeatedly over multiple meetings — in my stakeholder sessions.

A new and improved Parents.qu.edu experience will have the following effects:

• Improve student retention: Engaged, happy parents make for engaged, happy students

• Improve fundraising: Demonstrate the impact of Quinnipiac Parents Fund and clearly define giving benefits

• Make tuition payments easy and frustration-free: Go from multiple page clicks and sifting through institutional jargon on desktop —> Ability to press “Make a payment” on mobile phone

• Convert “sideline parents” into “brand ambassadors”: “Quinnipiac clearly cares about my concerns and needs, they’re awesome!”

If we, the university, truly care about the parent experience, this project would have to be more than a simple content migration exercise. It would have to be a complete rebuild, from a restructured IA to fresh photos and copy based around a new content strategy.

My Mission

Parents are an essential audience to colleges and universities and they too deserve an optimized site experience.

Therefore, I have to create something digitally that does not exist physically: a hub that speaks to the Quinnipiac parent and family population, provide timely information and answer their questions, help them accomplish tasks easily with minimal friction, and ultimately, make them feel like an important part of the Quinnipiac community.

The Work

Initial Research

Before tackling the project head-on, I read through various articles by sources like Psychology Today, Inside Higher Ed, and The Atlantic on our target audience: today’s college parents. I boiled my findings down to three key takeaways:

• Today’s “helicopter parents” are much different than previous generations

  • They are hyper-involved in the lives of their students, forcing colleges and universities to cater not only to their students, but their families, too

  • “These parent dynamics have prompted many colleges and universities to spend more time in summer orientation programs with parents in an effort to help channel their high interests in positive and productive ways and to teach parents how to be effective partners with the institution for the benefit of the student.” - Psychology Today

• There is also a sizable “bystander” parent population — far less actively involved, tend to lack the educational experience and financial reserves to help their student navigate through college life

  • “These parents crave transparency and authenticity, especially when it comes to return on their investment.” - “The Partnership Between Colleges and Helicopter Parents,” The Atlantic

• Besides acting as an informational resource, web content should be emotionally-driven to drive engagement

  • Marketing team at Gettysburg College leveraged existing content from admissions and college life for a mailer targeted toward donors — they doubled their average gift size and total amount raised

  • “What we’ve found again and again is that nothing beats a well-crafted, emotionally driven piece of content. You don’t always have to lead with the ‘big gift’ or ‘donor challenge goal.’ If you tell a really good story that demonstrates the impact your ready can have by making a gift, often that’s all you need.” - “Work Smarter, Not Harder: Repurposing Content for Fundraising,” Inside Higher Ed

Making the new Parents.QU.edu user-centric would be a must to help my target audience navigate their new life as a college parent. I would also look to leverage quality photography and existing university profiles to draw them in, attempting to make the site experience enjoyable and not stressful.

Competitive Analysis and Information Architecture Reorganization

A content audit of the existing site experience uncovered a total of 40 pages covering anything from a message from the president of the Parents Association to 20+ pages of financial jargon belonging to the Bursar’s Office. Through this exercise I was able to identify the various stakeholders/subject matter experts I would meet with throughout the redesign process.

The site map at the time looked a little something like this:

After holding initial stakeholder meetings with members of the Development, Student Affairs and Bursar offices, I reviewed the parents site experiences from five competitor schools: Boston University, Syracuse University, Gettysburg College, Cornell University and Fairfield University. In some instances, their sites appeared as bloated and overloaded with content as ours; however, they all boasted a simplified navigation with user-friendly labels, i.e. “Giving” or “Get Involved” for fundraising efforts. I was able to come up with a new, proposed navigation and site map that looked like the following:

I was able to condense 8 repetitive, institution-centric main navigation categories with 4 clear, user-centric categories. All fundraising-related pages would be condensed into one “Get Involved” page to avoid all of the main navigation noise with the competing — but related — giving levels. The Bursar office would no longer be buried under “Resources,” and all of its child pages would live under a “Manage Student Finances” landing page. Main student events would live as child landing pages under one “Events” page that would also house dates for other upcoming events and link out to the various university calendars. Parent Resources would pretty much remain the same one catch-all “Resources” page, but with Spiritual Life information moved to the main QU.edu site under the “Student Experience” umbrella, a more suitable home for that type of student life content.

Content Strategy

I then formulated objectives for each of the main landing pages of the new site, along with proposed content sections. Some pages would act as simple wayfinding landing pages to get the user to the information they’re seeking (quickly directing a parent to the “Make a payment” call to action), and some might tell more of a story to influence the user (explaining how a parent can get involved with the university and the impact of a gift).

The main page objectives included:

Homepage: Act as a wayfinding page to the main sections of the microsite, with a featured event/promo component toward the top of the page that will be updated throughout the school year with top-of-mind action items — register for Parents and Family Weekend, Commencement date reminders, Orientation session signups, etc.

Get Involved: Show current parents how they can get involved with the Quinnipiac community by detailing non-giving and giving opportunities. Clearly describe what the Quinnipiac Parents Fund is, how their gift makes an impact, and differentiate the three giving levels and the benefits of each. Bottom line: Consolidate all giving info into one easily digestible page.

Resources: A one-stop shop for all pages/tools/resources a current Quinnipiac parent would want to access, from residential life move-in schedules to meal plan information.

Manage Student Finances: Section will house all common financial transactions at the university, while eliminating institutional jargon (Bursar, e-Cashier, e-billing) and replace with clear action items (make an online payment, view my online bill).

Events: Highlight the “Big Four” annual parent and family events and provide access to various Quinnipiac calendars. Will re-order the four event sections on the page throughout the year depending on which one is the next upcoming event (Commencement will appear first on the page in spring, for instance).

New Site Experience

Parents Homepage

Parents Giving Content

View full Get Involved page (PNG)

From “Bursar” to “Manage Student Finances”

View full Manage Student Finances page (PNG)

Highlighting Parent and Family Events

View full Events page (PNG)

Usability Testing

I conducted three separate user testing sessions and asked each participant to complete tasks that a Quinnipiac parent might try to achieve. I used a combination of my MacBook Pro laptop and TechSmith Relay screen recording software to conduct the testing. Each session lasted anywhere from 19 to 24 minutes and were conducted in person. The tasks included the following:

• Your student received a notification saying their tuition bill is due. Make a tuition payment online.

• Your freshman student will start class in the fall and will live in Irmagarde Tator Hall. When can your student move in?

• When is Parents and Family Weekend?

• Your student ran out of money and needs to do some laundry. Add funds to your student’s QCard.

• You’d like to make a gift to the Quinnipiac Parents Fund, which supports academic programs for current students. What are the three giving levels and the benefits of each?

As a result of these testing sessions, I uncovered the following main issues with the site:

Navigation needs to be improved

All test participants had issues with the way the navigation currently functions. The QU.edu website was designed as a responsive website, leaning heavily toward a mobile-first mindset. As a result, the main navigation is enclosed within a burger menu even on desktop. The secondary navigation that jumps the user from page to page within a specific section of the website appears initially on the bottom of the page and then sticks to the top of the screen when the user scrolls down. And the so-called “dot navigation” is located on the right side of the screen and initially displays as a dotted line that highlights each page section as the user scrolls down; if the user hovers over the dotted line with the cursor a navigation expands to reveal a section-by-section navigation populated with anchor links that drops the user down to specific sections of the page on clickthrough.

Proposed solutions: The secondary navigation needs to stand out more as it’s overlooked with the competing design elements of the website. The navigation bar should be placed at the top of the page and stay there at all times; there is no need for it to appear “under the fold” on page load below the lead image. By the time the navigation sticks to the top of the page as the user scrolls down, the user is already engaged with other content to really notice the navigation. The background color of the bar could use some tweaking to allow it to stand out a bit more, and the navigation labels could be a bit bigger.

The “dot navigation” should be open on initial page load to reveal the anchor links without the user having to know to hover over the dotted line to reveal the actual in-page navigation. The navigation could then collapse when the user begins to scroll down the page. This tweak would allow the dot navigation to act like a true side navigation and not be confused with a progress bar or static design element. It would also aid users not used to long-scrolling pages and allow them to easily identify the navigation and quickly drop them down the page.

Site frequently links out to other sites, leading to a fragmented and inconsistent experience

The parents site links out to other pages that aren’t part of the Parents.QU.edu site experience. For instance, Web Advisor is a page where students and parents make online payments to the university, while a giving form used for all fundraising functions at the university lives on a separate platform called iModules that houses much of the Quinnipiac Alumni website. One user found the inconsistent site experience uncomfortable to the point that he thought the Web Advisor page to make payments to the university looked “unsafe” because it didn’t resemble an official university page.

Proposed solution: In short, there is no easy solution to this problem. Ideally, there should be one consistent site experience and all pages should have the same look and branding. However, there are many different departments, offices and schools at the university, and different administrations use different digital tools and applications. Stakeholders could be identified according to the top-trafficked pages, and resources could be put in place to give those pages a bit of a facelift so they look more like the QU.edu and Parents.QU.edu site experience by incorporating official Quinnipiac colors and fonts, logos and branding.

Move-in information is hard to find

All users failed to complete Task 2, which asked them to find a move-in schedule that is linked off of the Parents Resources page. None of the users initially thought of move-in information as a resource, some of them thought of move-in as an event that would clearly be displayed somewhere, and all of them expected the information to be on the homepage because of it might be a top-of-mind parent-related item depending on the time of the year.

Proposed solution: Expanded stakeholder interviews should be held across campus with various offices that deal with the parent population, and a calendar should be created that documents the events throughout the academic year that parents need to know about. Based off of this calendarization of the student experience, the homepage should contain a section at the top of the page that hosts timely information at the top of the page that gets updated throughout the year, such as a move-in schedule and new student information posted during the summer months, Parents and Family Weekend information in early fall, and holiday bus schedules and dorm closures at the end of the semester, etc.

Creating one calendar page catered toward the parent population is another potential solution, and would cut down on the need to point to different calendars with different information.

Upcoming Events items aren’t actionable

All three users attempted to click on the text contained in the Upcoming Events section at the top of the homepage, but the component did not contain linked elements. “I want to click on these dates to get more information, but I can’t,” said one user.

Proposed solution: Each event listed in the Upcoming Events component should link to a page, or the University Events calendar to a specific listing. The component is used frequently throughout the QU.edu site as a design element that shows upcoming important dates, and was always thought of as a text component that displays basic information; clearly, users thought the event text would take them to more detailed information on clickthrough.

Results & Findings

The redesign was a big improvement over the old Parents.QU.edu site experience, and all involved stakeholders were pleased with both the process and the look and organization of the new pages. The navigation could definitely use some tweaking to truly make the site user-friendly not just for the parent population using the Parents.QU.edu microsite, but for the prospective student population browsing QU.edu. More stakeholders need to be involved in a potential “version 2.0” launch of Parents.QU.edu, and their input will help content creation and planning for the site moving forward.

That being said, I have already put together a list of proposed content additions to the website that would be of interest to Quinnipiac parents and families:

• Get Involved

  • One big story that highlights the impact of giving to the Quinnipiac Parents Fund (could also be repurposed and used in Development promotional materials)

• Resources

  • Bobcat Glossary (similar to Boston University’s “Terrier Lingo” list of student terms that parents show know)

  • Curated Parents & Families Contacts list (rather than a link out to the general school directory)

  • Detailed Parents & Families Calendar (academic year breakdown of what students are going through, how parents can help and what they should be asking)

• Finances

  • Expand page to include all online financial transactions:

    • Housing deposits

    • Admissions/matriculation fee

    • Ordering transcripts

    • Parking fines

• “Prospective Parents” page

  • Leverage existing content to highlight key metrics, student outcomes and value of investing in a Quinnipiac education

• “New Parents” page

  • Emphasize “First 100 Days” of student life — easing parents’ concerns about transition from high school and the home to college life