Cal Poly Pomona CBA

Design For All: Current vs. Prospective Students

BACKGROUND

California State Polytechnic University (known as Cal Poly Pomona) is a polytechnic university located in the Los Angeles Metro area. The College of Business Administration (CBA) is one of the nine colleges that make up Cal Poly Pomona. The university adopted new branding in 2018 and the CBA saw this as an opportunity to upgrade their website. Aside from just incorporating the new branding, they also wanted to edit their content and enhance user experience. The site is built with Cascade and is managed by the university IT department. I was brought in on contract to explore some of the options around upgrading the site.

THE OBJECTIVE

Update the College of Business Administration (CBA) at Cal Poly Pomona’s website to incorporate new branding and enhance user experience.

Phase One: Research

Identifying Our Users

Project Stakeholders identified 4 key groups of users for the CBA site. Of these, I chose to focus more closely on current students and prospective students, as Student Success is a central theme in all the university's initiatives.

Methods

I used some standard UX research techniques to try to discover what typical users are looking for when visiting the CBA site. I started with Secondary Research in the form of online Market Research and I also created a Competitive Analysis to see what kind of features similar schools use to present information to their users, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. CBA isn’t necessarily “competing” with these school, but seeing what similar schools are doing gives us a good lay of the land to get started. I also explored the existing site to understand the existing layout and content. At the request of the client, I also reviewed Google Analytics to see what pages were most visited… keeping in mind that Google Analytics can tell us the what, but it cannot tell us the why.
For Primary Research, I talked to users. I performed a Contextual Inquiry with 6 current CBA students to see how they are (or are not, in most cases) using the CBA website. I also sent a Questionnaire to high school students to find out what they look for on a school website that they might be considering applying to and/or attending.

Summary of Findings

I uncovered some surprising things in my research, namely that 72% of the current CBA students I interviewed never use the CBA website. on the other hand, prospective students rely heavily on a school’s website. They are looking for content that gives them a feel for what campus life is really like and if they can envision themselves fitting in. The contextual inquiries included a series of tasks for the students to perform while I watched them. Their performance on these tasks helped identify which information is hard to find. I feel like the CBA website is missing an opportunity to engage with current students. It’s important to provide information to prospective students but not at the expense of those currently enrolled.

Please see my Phase One - Research Summary with detailed information on all my research and recommendations for this project.

PHASE TWO - DESIGN/PLAN

Considerations

Based on my research, I identified some issues that should be addressed on the new website. I divided these recommendations into two categories: Navigation, and Content.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Insights from market research and contextual inquiries with current students drew my attention to how the current Navigation is structured and where it could benefit from re-organization, specifically to make it:

• More intuitive: Organize content based on user expectations
• More User Friendly: Consider using a mega menu and optimized Global Nav and contextual left side nav for fewer clicks and better wayfinding
• Emphasize/elevate Content: There is content that the students were completely unable to find. make sure important content can be found.
• Optimise existing Nav: Consider reorganizing the Navigation bar with more descriptive headings, and consider adding more categories if necessary.

CONTENT

Consider adding more engaging content to invite a majority of users to interact. Some things to consider:

• Personalization: By including more evergreen, people-focused content rather than only event-based content we can give students a better sense of what makes CBA unique. Student spotlight stories, student testimonials, “day in the life” type content is engaging to prospective students and might give current students a more positive connection and feeling of belonging that could impact student success and retention. Consider the use of video for some of this content
• Branding: Implement the new branding and ensure that every page looks like it belongs together to give users a sense of place
• Plan for Mobile: Ensure content is skimmable. Enure Images, headlines, and sub heads are organized for easy skimming. Most importantly be sure the site performs as well (if not better) on mobile as it does on a desktop or laptop.