Bucknell University
Project: Bucknell.edu Website Redesign
Project Lead, Kickoff Meetings, User Research, User Needs Assessment, Information Architecture, Design Prototypes & Review, Content Strategy
The Problem
Bucknell University epitomizes the classic college experience: a beautiful campus, rigorous academics, a close-knit community. The only problem... so do many of its competitors. They knew they needed to do something daring in order to attract a bolder and more experimental student body. The school tasked us with giving them a new site that completely blew up the higher ed model. They wanted us to give them a site that had never been done before.
The Solution
Breaking Conventions
In order to come up with a completely different product, we challenged ourselves to throw our process out the window and tackle a full .edu redesign in a completely new way. To start, we knew we couldn't rely on the content that already existed on the site. Bucknell craved a marketing site that was streamlined and completely focused on their users’ needs. In order to accomplish this lofty task, we had to start with the user, and try to meet all of their needs first. Additional content, that might have been a priority to the institution but not the user, had to get cut.
A NEW WAY TO EXPLORE CONTENT
We broke all expectations of what a higher ed navigation needed to be. We railed against the big four navigation items, “About,” “Academics,” Admissions,” and “Student Life.” We provided Bucknell with a completely user-focused navigation, that anticipated target audience needs and allowed each type of user to completely customize their own online Bucknell experience. We also placed an emphasis on search, essentially turning the website into usable database that didn't rely on a specific structure in order to meet its users’ needs. We used the concept of a cookbook as our model. Users can read through the Bucknell online experience chapter by chapter, or search for a specific "ingredient" in the site's index to find exactly what they need at any moment. The tool provides additional context to help users find content relevant to their search by identifying if a result is a page of content, an office, a document, etc.
NEW TOOLS
In order to create such a vastly different product we had to reinvision everything, from what our IA deliverable would be, to the tools the Bucknell team would continue to use to vet the validity of any any piece of content that was to be published on the site.
Read more about how we even went so far as to reimagine a content audit for this project in my blogpost, Doing a Content Audit in Reverse.