SJSU Online is San Jose State University's 100% online degree-completion initiative that helps students who experience unexpected life changes by giving them another opportunity to finish what they started.
Before our team was created, our stakeholder worked with a vendor to created page templates with modular UI components. They then hired a marketing director and content manager to flesh out the site map and content.
The groundwork was done with User Acceptance Testing and troubleshooting small UX issues, but a lot of work still needed to be done, with several components lacking usability, engaging designs, and visual tone that spoke to our audience.
My first task was to reimagine the visual direction of our site. I took the universities existing brand and conceptualized a sub-brand with a narrative that resonates with our audience of adult learners.
SJSU Online's brand colors are inspired by the athletic's colors and utilized with accessibility in mind. I added a new teal accent tone to SJSU, representing a new start and a prosperous future for our audience.
While themain SJSU site does not utilize our custom serif font on our website, I sought to utilize SJSU Spartan as an accent to incorporate more of the main university's brand while relying on Nunito Sans to lead our site in accessibility and usability.
I envisioned our site to be filled with the faces of who our users could be. When the first SJSU Online cohort graduated, I helped coordinate a photo and video shoot to produce media for our website, including a hero video.
After launching, I did a number of things to gain insight on how to improve our website, such as conducting user testing, surveys, and analyzed heatmaps and scroll maps to learn about how our users behaved on our website.
Our main focus was to hone in our content: hone in on the content our users need, remove all information our users do not need, and house that information in UI components that are engaging and easier to read.
Not only did I think about what information we should be presenting, but how we should be presenting them. I explored different ways we should organize content on our site and new possibilities to how we can present them in a refreshing and simple way.
Each page is designed to be a seamless, informative, inspiring, and motivating experience with the users interests and needs put first. I incorporated our brand into the look and feel of the website while prioritizing accessibility.
Our site relied on word heavy, dense content. After shaving unnecessary content out, I designed and coded more reusable UI components to help highlight our content even more and give our site a refreshing look and easier reading experience.
When working with a variety of people who want content on the website, I made sure content was curated for the main objective of the website.
Since the site launched, many design experiments were made for each page to improve its design. After each enrollment cycle, SJSU Online evolved into a more engaging experience for prospective students.
17% increase in engagement rate in comparison to previous year of enrollment cycle.