CASE STUDY

 

A basic case study answers these questions:

1. The project:

• What was the problem and what was the goal?

• Who were the main stakeholders?

• What was your role?

• What constraints were you working with?

• What was your timeline?

2. Your UX process:

• How did you make decisions based on user research?

• How did you collaborate with other teams, designers, and PMs to learn as much as possible about user needs?

3. Your creative process:

• How did you iterate on copy?

• Why did you choose the words you did?

• What were other explorations that didn’t succeed?

• How did you make final decisions on copy?

4. The final product and results:

• You don’t need to share confidential information, but we need to know how you measured success. Did you use analytics, testimonials, reviews?

• How long did it take?

• What were the main lessons learned?

 

When I joined Brown University's CareerLAB, I was immediately tasked with redesigning our website. Through collaboration with the central marketing office, user interviews, content strategy, and insights from our website analytics, I developed a more user-friendly site for our various stakeholders.

 

THE PROJECT

 

The CareerLAB website redesign will include the following activities:

• Redesign the home page around users’ critical tasks.

• Redesign the site architecture and navigation to improve the user experience.

• Optimize and maximize Brown Drupal features to increase usability.

• Develop a content strategy to improve existing and new site content -- minimizing overwhelming text and making content more digestible.

• Integrate photos and videos into the site to increase user engagement.

• Make website easily accessible and interactive for our various constituents: undergraduate students, graduate students, employers, alumni, and Brown faculty and staff (cross-examine Google analytics, increase usage by 10%).

 

SUCCESS CRITERIA

The website redesign project will be successful if it creates a better flow of information for our various constituents, creates a higher usage rate of our website among (ideally) students, and better brands

CareerLAB as a department and as job and internship/career readiness experts for the greater Brown

community.

 

APPROACH

• As students are our primary constituents and focus for the website redesign, integrating student voice into the redesign process will be an integral component of the project.

• Communicate to all CareerLAB staff the plans to redesign the website.

• Incentivize staff and create buy-in to create content for website pages.

• Develop work plan and lead progress checkpoint meetings with staff.

• Work with Brown Web Management to integrate widgets to make the website more user-friendly.

• Research user information architecture best practices and other “aspiration” career services websites for a frame of reference.

• Create the structure for an iterative process, complete with feedback from key stakeholders at each phase of the development process.

• Determine a way to measure the effectiveness of the website redesign and its impact on student engagement.

 

KEY STAKEHOLDERS

 

This project is executable with the commitment, involvement, and engagement of the CareerLAB

staff including the Career Advising team (6 members), Employer Relations team (2 members),

BrownConnect team (2 members), and Operations team (2 members).

 

Content creation will be produced by the CareerLAB staff with copyediting and consistency of language made by Jill Pimentel. Jill will be responsible for testing language choices, graphic placements, and overall website information architecture design and strategy.