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Helping students navigate a confusing landscape: A UX case study

An aging site for students at Penn State World Campus, built on an out-of-date platform, needed to be replaced. But stakeholders were mistrustful of the web team, there was little agreement among stakeholders about what was important to students and students seemingly weren’t even finding the site within a confusing institutional web landscape.

In response to these challenges, the team devised a research- and content-first approach to align stakeholders, build trust and ensure that students can easily find the information and support they need.

In this session, we will discuss this project as a case study. Learn how we used UX methodologies, including top tasks, usability and journey studies, card sorts and first-click research, to deeply understand the student perspective, earn stakeholder trust and get everyone on the same page. Learn about the design, content and SEO strategies that kept the project on track and student-focused. And we’ll share some of the stumbles that occurred on the way, and how we would have done things differently to avoid them.

Presenter

Matt Ryan — Penn State University

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