THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA  -  GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

The University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education is one of the nation's premier education schools. It prepares teachers, administrators, and entrepreneurs to lead the next generation of schools across our country.  Since 1914, Penn GSE has led research in teaching and learning, the cultural contexts of education, education reform, language education, quantitative research methods, and practitioner inquiry for thousands of students and alumni.  The school is innovative however its website was staid. It did not reflect or showcase the exciting work done by the school.

A Few Highlights:

• Imagery: Many schools focus on campus imagery or images of the city in order to show prestige - this is very often done with city schools showing off the skyline, or famous universities like Harvard leading with their quad. While cool, those images don't show impact. We wanted the images employed throughout the site to showcase innovative public/private partnerships.

• Language: Confusing nomenclature caused incredibly high bounce rates and tangled user flows. We simplified titles and pages using plain language.

• User Navigation: Audiences were silo-ed by self identifications: "prospective student," "parent," "current student," "alumni," and other labels are all superficial divisions. Users can fit into many buckets. Instead we re-built the information architecture to a task-based model. Pages now align with goals that user groups have onsite - combined when possible into single locations.

• Content Strategy: We knew that highlighting the individuals that make Penn GSE the world class institution that it is, we would turn the website into a place of story discovery rather than a purely functional tool.

• Wireframes: 8 Responsive Templates created, featuring 15 re-usable and multi-purpose modules

In order to create an engaging user interface that was relevant to many disparate audiences with overlapping goals, we undertook a series of activities. Stakeholder interviews, user surveys, alumni interviews, and a deep analysis of clickstream testing, helped us to suggest solutions which fit into the preexisting Content Management System. The website already had hundreds of pages with underused content. Content creation was not the problem; but management and organizational structure was. Our goal was to highlight those underutilized pages and bring them to the fore.