⬅️  Homepage

I helped a leading EdTech firm redesign its website, reintroducing its suite of solutions and making content more usable.

Client: EAB Industry: Higher Education, Software & Services Duration: April - December 2022 Role: UX and Product Lead Responsibilities: UX and Design project planning, user research planning, Information architecture, wireframes, content strategy, prototyping, usability testing, data modeling, CMS documentation

The new Homepage.

Background 📋

EAB is a leading provider of education research services intended to make education smarter and communities stronger. They partner with schools all over the world providing best practices for increasing enrollment, strengthening diversity, and supporting student success. EAB accomplishes this by offering data-driven insights, tailored guidance from education experts, and enterprise software. They needed a new website that showcased it's unique mix of solutions and better reflected their brand promise to new customers.

Challenge

“I have gone to try to look through the research, but I'll admit, I have found that very difficult to navigate.” Customer **Insight

EAB had acquired companies, grown its product offerings, and evolved its service lines.

• Business challenge: the website doesn’t represent the company’s full suite of technology and services making the sales cycle confusing and tedious.
• User challenge: customers have difficulty finding content they pay for, such as research and insight articles, and navigating service offerings available to them.

Solution

“We don't have a great strategy of, where does it go on the web? How is someone going to get there? Stakeholder Insight

We reduced marketing content by removing over 1,000 blog posts, restructured nearly 20 product pages, and added five new templates for marketing pages. This resulted in more usable website that made it easier for customers to find high-quality research.

Role

UX and Project Lead

As project lead I was responsible for steering the project plan by working with our Project Manager to identify tasking for UX and Visual Design disciplines. I also kept an eye on the goals and KPIs of the client goals and communicated strategies to the team to ensure the work would meet them. As the Lead UX designer, I was responsible for informing and guiding all aspects of the UX work. Specifically, I lead the UX auditing, modeling, wireframing, and prototyping. I worked alongside a Content Strategist and another UX designer. —— *The Team: ***Project Manager, Technical Project Manager, UX Designers (2), Content Strategist, Visual Designer, Platform Engineer, UI Engineer

Insights and Learnings 💡

<aside> 💡 Here are some things I learned:

• Different Roles, Different Goals. Content access subscription models are tricky to get right when user needs within the same organization are seen as homogeneous. Permissions that allow for better customization at the user level (opposed to the organization level) should be considered when making architectural decisions. Simply giving users access to everything their organization pays for, which is seemingly a logical decision - may result in diminishing an individual’s site experience.
• Good content is easy to find content. The “utility” of content doesn’t seem to evaluated on the substance, but rather the way in which it's organized, presented, and made discoverable by the UI. If customer success representatives claim that users are unhappy with your content, I’d first want to make sure they’re not identifying a navigational or findability issue. I would talk to real people first and have them walk me through their process of finding the content they’re after. I’d also test labeling and assess where users are getting lost.
• Make any premium content identifiable. Having access to both premium and freemium content can be confusing and frustrating to users when they can’t readily identify which the content they pay for. It’s important that users be able to distinguish between these two classes of content. But not only is this a potential issue for users, it’s also bad for business. When users can’t figure out what their premium access gets them, they’re less likely to upgrade or buy more in the future. </aside>

Process 🔄

Testing Navigational Issues

We heard from stakeholders was that the website was difficult to navigate and high-value content wasn’t easy to find. The fact that customer success representatives had instituted a practice of regularly sending customers direct links to new content more or less validated their stakeholder assumption.

We wanted to learn where exactly customers are getting confused and/or lost so we wrote out a series of key tasks and conducting a Treejack test ****that ran for about 2 weeks. ****

“If we don't send it, it's very hard to find.”

Stakeholder Insight

A snapshot of our Treejack test. Some of the questions we wanted to investigate: 1) Do labels and categories in the navigation menus align with user expectations? 2) How are website users attempting to find the information they’re looking for?

Process

Assessing Content Efficacy

One of the first things I do when working on a content site is to try ascertain the shape of the site. What content exists, how much is there, and how is it structured, etc. We began with a CMS export of the entire site and marrying that with the client’s Google Analytics statistics in Airtable. From here we could slice and dice to our heart’s content. One takeaway was that the site was bloated with relatively old marketing content - blogs and opinion pieces that were published more than 3 years ago. We recommended that the client cull through this chuck of content and consider which to retire. Not only would this bolster the findability of new content but also reduce the overall amount of content on the site.

While we cranked on the content audit, we also conducted workshops to better understand the client’s content workflow. How content “gets done” more or less. This gave us helpful insight into how content is originated, reviewed, and published. We found the client’s workflow to be sound and effective for getting new, desirable content on the web. However, we saw opportunities for growth was in the ongoing maintenance and governance aspect.