UIC College of Education Website

UIC’s College of Education was looking for an updated website that would bring in more applicants. Their program has a focus on urban education leadership, and primarily feeds into the Chicago Public School system. They have research and outreach programs that put their student teachers into the classrooms they are being prepared to teach.

We worked with UIC’s College of Education team to learn more about their current students’ needs and interviewed both current and prospective students about what they were looking for on the site and what they wish they could find there. We found one particularly problematic page in the former website where the user clicks to learn more about the programs and is faced with a letter from the Dean. This was the only passage through to the programs page and the only way in was by clicking on a text link in the content of the letter to “Apply Today,” which many students were unprepared to do. Had they clicked that link, they would have arrived at the programs page, but we unfortunately found a huge user drop off from this page.

We built a prototype site based on the data we had collected and tested the prototype with the students. The organization of the new site was split into two parts: one section for students, one for prospective donors. Besides reorganizing the content, we also removed content that wasn’t performing well based on our analyses. This was the best way to ensure that each user type was able to find the information relevant to their needs and not be bogged down with irrelevant information.

We also created new sections of sub-navigation including the section for Popular Content which is essentially a list of quick links to sections that students were using most often, and we created a single organized page for the programs and curricula for each of the degree programs.