How to Digitally Transform Higher Ed with Drupal

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome everyone and thank you for joining today’s webinar, How to Digitally Transform Higher Ed with Drupal.
• #3: So a little about Mediacurrent. We are the “Open Source Expansion Partner” What this means is that we help organizations that want to elevate and advance their open source digital experience. We do this by aligning with our partner’s business goals and needs and solve them with open source technologies.
• #6: Today we’re going to go over things to think about and discuss internally before your upcoming redesign or RFP process, then we’ll go into some solutions: Solutions to common challenges we’ve experienced and then we’ll go into a programmatic time saver solution we use here at Mediacurrent.
• #7: Celeste: Here at Mediacurrent, we’ve spent the last 13 years helping some of the best-known higher ed institutions in the US exceed the performance expectations of their Drupal platform.
• #9: I’ll be covering 10 key decisions that will affect the success of an upcoming website redesign. Not all may even result in an actual decision, however simply discussing these topics internally, as early as possible, will be advantageous for your team, your web team, and your budget planning. Uncovering these topics when designs or programming is already in motion, may prove to result in rework or missed opportunities, subsequently affecting your timeline and budget. We listed these 10 topics are in the form of 1 main question, with a few “talking point” questions for each, that we use in our own discoveries with clients. We have also formatted these into Checklist for you, as pdf download. We wanted you to be able to save this checklist, call a meeting internally, and use it as your ready-made agenda to guide your discussions. We’ll link this for you before we end today, but now let’s dive in...
• #10: Celeste: Question 1: What Are the Goals of Our New Website? Setting these goals will guide later decisions relating to content strategy, design, functionality, and future marketing efforts. Typically for higher ed, one of these goals is to increase enrollment applications, but we encourage you to go one step further to try and drill down with some details to set additional smaller goals. One goal Example: You may want to increase diversity overall, or you already have a diverse student body but you want the website and messaging to clearly reflect a diverse and inclusive environment. If this is identified early on, this will affect which images you select within your design, the on-page content, and possibly functionality-if you decide to build support for multilingual pages. Other Examples: You may want to reduce confusion about a particular program, or to increase alumni donations. Lastly: A goal can be to address an internal inefficiencies to address? You may not see how the website can resolve an issue with internal processes, but it absolutely can and that’s what your web team is for, that’s built in to our discovery process here. So simply identifying and documenting the bottlenecks and areas where you struggle, will be very valuable for yourselves and your web team. Knowing these issues early can ensure that goals are tied to them, and measuring success against them will help you prove ROI.
• #11: Celeste: Question 2: Should We Keep or Consolidate Microsites? It is extremely common for higher ed entities to have multiple websites, and even having multiple microsites within a single department. From a user’s perspective, this can create more steps and tons of info to consume, challenging their ability to accomplish a task or make a decision. Microsites can and do serve a purpose in certain instances, but many times they are not necessary and only a result of internal choices and without consideration for the users. Factors to consider are, is the audience completely different, arriving with a different intention than those that would be browsing on the main site? Many times, a smart, intuitive design with added navigation and content flexibility resolve the need for a microsite? If you find that microsites are still needed, a little later on, Jay is going to show us a solution we use to do those very easily and efficiently.
• #12: Celeste: Question 3: How Do We Maintain Brand Consistency? Having a brand guide is pretty standard for higher ed, especially since there are often multiple websites, emails, print materials, social channels, etc. However, they are generally not updated or re-distributed very often. The term “brand” has evolved, and today, it means “what people remember about you” which can take many forms and perceived in many ways. So your brand guide should include messaging guidelines; how you speak to your audience, which will guide content publishers.  To keep visual consistency across web entities and throughout the site itself, a pattern library is a type of web style guide that sets guidelines for how your web fonts, buttons, links, images and other content pieces are styled. Lastly, It is also extremely important to adopt the mindset that your fixed brand colors may have to be adjusted for web accessibility. There are color and text combinations that are troublesome to view on screen, especially for those with color blindness or other visual impairments. Screens across all devices are calibrated differently so it’s likely no two screens will adopt the exact shade anyway.
• #13: Celeste: And continuing with the topic of web accessibility... Question 4: What is Our Plan for Web Accessibility Compliance? Accessibility includes the design, the code, and the metadata attached to your content pieces like alternative text when you upload images. Users of screenreaders and other assistive technology rely on this to understand your content. The general standard is to strive for AA level compliance, however this is not something that is done once at launch and remains compliant forever. Because content is continually being added, code is being updated for new features, fixes and security, it should be included as part of your website maintenance plan. At Mediacurrent, we have some automated and manual testing tools, however a very user friendly tool we (and many clients) also use that monitors ALL your pages sitewide, is one called Siteimprove.
• #14: Celeste: Question 5: What is Our Preference on Content Migration? You’ll want to determine: If your content is still relevant, accurate, and serving your audience well? Many automatically assume that it will be migrated over as-is, but with a new design, as part of discovery you’ll want to revisit your user personas, your analytics, and take an overall inventory and audit what content is truly working well to engage your personas, vs. what pages should be reworked. Sometimes the content is clear, speaks directly to the user and is written well, but new images and videos will make the new design more effective. In many cases, the content usually has walls of text that just need to be broken up, with added headings, in order to be skimmable (because about 80% of users scan the page instead of reading), and also adding what we call “guiding language” to help the user know what to do and expect to find on each page and after each click. And speaking of writing content, that brings us into question #6...
• #15: Celeste: Question 6: Who Will Be Responsible for Content Governance after launch of the new site? Once the content has been audited, updated, refreshed and you’ve done all of this work to present it well within the new design, you’ll want to protect that investment by making sure someone or several someones are maintaining it in the same way. So you’ll want to discuss who will be filling this role, will it require full-time attention, and will they require training to make sure that best practices are being used. We usually recommend having a few “gatekeepers” that will ensure that alternative text will be written to describe images for accessibility, page content is using clear, familiar language at about an 8th grade reading level, images will be sized appropriately before uploading, and that they will be adhering to your brand standards in writing style.
• #16: Celeste: Question 7: When Should We Convert PDFs? PDFs are probably the one type of content that often pose the most challenges for users and are the thorn in side of everyone working in user experience. These should not be overlooked. First, they pose an accessibility issue because screen readers cannot scan within the document itself, not to mention already difficult to read and scroll through on mobile. If it’s a “fillable pdf,” these are left to the browser to render the image and there’s often difficulty in saving them; these are not the same as web forms. PDFs are basically a no-win situation on any website, unless there’s a specific reason for a supplemental download (such as the checklist we’ll provide you with today). It should never replace an actual web form or content that is pertinent to the page. So that being said, they undoubtedly exist on your website, because every site has them, but a plan should be discussed to convert these into web friendly content, or evaluated to see if it’s even worth the effort to do so. Converting PDFs may affect your internal processes and take time and several people, so the earlier it can be discussed, the more time you will have to do this, ideally while your new website build is in progress.
• #17: Celeste: Question 8: What is Our Protection Plan for SEO?Many website redesigns will inevitably result in some SEO impact to your site’s rankings due to changes within your navigation, url structures, on-page content, and the code itself. The key is to audit where you stand, and develop a technical and on-page optimization plan for the pre and post-launch process. At the very least, by doing this, you can minimize any negative impact, and at best you can improve your rankings and/or increase the number of keywords you rank for. To clarify, you don’t need to necessarily have perform an SEO audit and SEO migration plan yourselves, most agencies, like we do at Mediacurrent, do this as part of the discovery process, however discussing these questions internally beforehand will tell you what you need to convey to your web team.
• #18: Celeste: Question 9: How Do We Make Data-Driven Decisions? Data-driven decision making can sometimes sound like wishful thinking, but discussing this early and often will help get you there. Data can be used to bring issues to light, justify any changes in functionality, or justify costs for proposed changes. You’ll want to identify which tracking tools are being used (for example Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Search Console, or Siteimprove). And more importantly, how is the data being used? Who has eyes on it and what is it saying about how users are engaging with us? Any metrics that are unknown now, can go in your “nice to have” list. Your web team will be able to put this in place for you fairly easily if it is known early on.
• #19: Celeste: Question 10: What is Our MVP, Critical for Launch? In the web development world, we use the term MVP often, which is “Minimum Viable Product” this the version that has most prioritized, launch-critical features. This does not have to be an all encompassing list of features, but if there are items that the site has to include, so important that you would hold up launch for it, then that would be part of the MVP. Other features that would not be as critical right away, can be listed for phase II. One misconception that we hear a lot is that Phase II means way down the road. Phase II can start immediately after launch. So you do not have to throw the kitchen sink into the website plan and take over a year to build, web teams are used to iteration, so prioritizing features this way will help your timeline, and budget planning. I will now pass it to Sheree to talk through some common challenges we’ve helped work through with our higher ed clients.
• #20: Sheree: Thank you Celeste. Now that we have a clearer roadmap of how to plan a successful website redesign, let’s talk a little bit of some of the challenges that we have seen our partners face in higher education.
• #21: Sheree: From our research and work we understand that a positive user experience requires basic usability. Websites that followed usability guidelines are seen to be more intuitive and users are able to complete tasks successfully.
• #22: Sheree: Here is a quote from a prospective student during a usability study done by the Nielsen Norman group. When navigating school websites, users were asked if they would be interested in attending that school. This user was unable to find Mathematics listed on the academics program page and therefore lost interest in continuing to engage with the brand.
• #23: Sheree: Let’s take a look at how we approached student engagement goals for one of our clients, Emory Goizueta Business School. Emory University’s Goizueta Business School ranks as a top-tier business school. The marketing website is Goizueta’s core digital asset and a key investment to achieve their mission.
• #24: Sheree: One of the UX features of the Goizueta website is a interactive program comparison chart. This leverages some common behaviors that people demonstrate as they relate to product design, this helps users in achieving their goals effectively and quickly. We designed this feature by considering the existing products in the market and the psychology and culture of our users, this helps avoid the kind confusion and frustration that we saw in the previous comment.
• #25: Sheree: Another challenge in designing websites for higher ed is building trust transparency and credibility. This is created through the sum of many interactions and touch points that a brand has with their customer. Trust is the strongest currency in our growing sharing economy. Here are some questions to ask in order to build better relationships with your customers.
• #26: Sheree: Here is a quote from a prospective student during a usability study done by the Nielsen Norman group. When navigating school websites, users were asked for feedback about the experience. This user was was expressed the frustration he felt about not finding the information that was valuable to him.
• #27: Sheree: We want to start by telling stories the moment that people land on our website. Transparency is a key principle in building trust with users, so make facts prominent and at the beginning of an experience. Use facts, eye studies show numbers attract attention. Use scannable highlights, users consume information best in small, digestible chunks. Appeal to users with summaries. Most of all, don’t make them work hard to meet you!
• #28: Sheree: Let’s take a look at how we applied these concepts in our redesign for Emory Goizueta University. We created is an animated data point components. This feature lives at the top of the page experiences so that the user is able to easily gather ranking, authority, credibility and build trust with the brand. This feature also allows each department to tell their own story, empowering stakeholders and content authors.
• #29: Sheree: This feature also allows each department to tell their own story, empowering stakeholders and content authors. Here you can see how the Full time MBA program ranks, average salary and bonus, as well as the student to faculty ratio.
• #30: Sheree: Here is an example of what the animation looks like on the website. Micro-animations such as these are considered to be delighters and serve in a number of ways. They draw the eyes attention to the data and can produce a dopamine response, resulting in a positive experience for the user.
• #31: Sheree: Now let’s talk about something we are all familiar with. Competing priorities! One common issue we see with schools is that sometimes there may be conflict of interests between departments. So how do we address this? When we kick off our projects we begin with a discovery session. In this workshop we air all grievances of the current site. We interview everyone and all have a chance to be heard. There is a core team that is the final approval that includes the decision making unit.
• #32: Sheree: One of the hot pieces of real estate between stakeholders is often the homepage header. Here are some tips when considering your content strategy. First and foremost welcome your users, introduce yourself by stating your brand message, Tell a new user what happens here, what you stand for, and how it can tie into a user's hopeful outcome. Showcase research to establish authority. Feature stories and news, also this is a great place to promote events. Try and avoid placing blanked statements or positions in this area and use it to give information that really sets you apart.
• #33: Sheree: One way to solve for completing priorities is to give your stakeholders a peek in and make them a part of your campaign planning. Campaign planning should occur every year. We often do this in partnership with our clients to help establish KPI and website goals that celeste touched on earlier in our presentation. A campaign calendar is a great way to plan content for the school and include research, alumni and staff. I’ll pass this over to Jay to talk show us some demos, including Rain University!