How Our Collaborative Discovery Informed the Design of Stanford Summer Session

Stanford's Summer Session provides current Stanford students, high schoolers and students at other universities with the opportunity to complete a summer at Stanford – getting a full experience of the coursework and college life Stanford offers.

In 2017, Summer Session and High School Summer College merged to better serve students and the institute's goals. With this merge, they needed a unified digital presence to better reflect their identity and effectively market their program.

Through a series of collaborative workshops, discussions and research, we leveraged input from students, staff and their communications team to design a compelling structure and interface to communicate with their audiences.

In this case study, we'll discuss how we designed: navigation, homepage, tuition calculator, and student gateway.

Transcript

1. How Our Collaborative Discovery Informed the Design of Stanford Summer Session CHRISTINE COUGHLAN
2. Chris
 Coughlan DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL STRATEGY
3. @atendesign aten.io
4. Work That
 Matters
5. Work That
 Matters
6. How Our Collaborative Discovery Informed the Design of Stanford Summer Session CHRISTINE COUGHLAN
7. Overview
8. “Stanford Summer Session extends a transformative educational experience to ambitious, high- achieving students.
9. +
11. Drupal at Stanford • Stanford Drupal Camp, 2019 marks 10 years • Stanford Sites: free, self-service tool for building and managing websites for university work • Robust Support System • Drupallers: Slack channel and listserv • Web Services Team: meetings, bootcamps, and blog

12. Opportunities • Merging content from two separate sites • Multiple populations with different but similar content needs • Prospective students vs. accepted students • Building community

13. Process DESIGN STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT
14. COLLABORATIVE DISCOVERY ORGANIZATION USERS CONTENT
15. Key Initiatives • Analytics Review • Card Sorting Workshop • Content Analysis • Core Model Workshop • Goals & KPIs • Personas • Staff Interviews • Surveys
16. Major Features
17. Tuition and fees calculator
21. Discovery Zone • Analyze Current Experience • Student Survey • Staff Interviews • Core Model Exercise
23. Discovery Zone • Analyze Current Experience • Student Survey • Staff Interviews • Core Model Exercise • Sketching
25. Discovery Zone • Analyze Current Experience • Student Survey • Staff Interviews • Core Model Exercise • Sketching • Wireframes • Design Comps
27. Student gateway with personalized content
28. Challenges • Only high school site had a student portal • For college students, information existed, but was intermixed with information for prospective students • Content varied by population type and could be accessed by all students
29. Discovery Zone • User Surveys • Card Sorting Exercise
31. Discovery Zone • User Surveys • Card Sorting Exercise • Sketching • Sitemap • Wireframes
35. Course catalog
36. Discovery Zone • Feature Request • Review of D7 Course Importer • Staff Interviews • Review of Course Spreadsheet
37. Placeholder for Spreadsheet
38. Discovery Zone • Feature Request • Review of D7 Course Importer • Staff Interviews • Review of Course Spreadsheet • Defined Course Content Type
41. Navigation
42. Discovery Zone • Content Analysis
44. Discovery Zone • Content Analysis • Google Analytics • Student Survey • Sitemap
46. Improved user experience
47. Key Takeaways • Unified experience • Reduced student and parent confusion • Better experience for staff
48. Thanks! speakerdeck.com/ccoughlan74 linkedin.com/in/ccoughlan