Babson.edu Redesign

The Challenge

As the cost of college continues to rise, and the focus on ROI intensifies, schools are feeling the pressure to create a clear, compelling case for prospective students—and their families. But, when you look at most university websites, they’re often as hard to navigate as the complex org structures and silos behind them.

Whether you’re an undergrad or graduate student, post-doc or professional lifelong learner, the information you need is likely spread out across the site. Deadlines and fees in one place, curriculum examples somewhere else. Browsing the site becomes a “pogo” experience, leaving the user bouncing up and down pages and across top nav categories. 

Babson College asked ZeroDegrees to reshape the traditional higher education website experience to better suit the needs of current and future users—while articulating Babson’s core philosophy of “Entrepreneurial Leadership” for all their audiences.

Our Approach

We started with stakeholder interviews to get us centered around Babson’s internal perceptions, needs and histories. Then, we held a series of workshops to facilitate a SWOT analysis that aligned project sponsors on key decisions: Where in the conversion funnel should we focus? Who are our user personas and what are their goals? What does success look like and how do we measure it?

Next, we talked to dozens of users. We joined them as they traversed higher education sites. What information did they need most? Where did they expect it to live on a site? How did the best experiences help them make decisions? How did the Babson experience help them feel confident in a return on their investment? 

When the dust settled, it was clear that the “pogo”-ing was a big problem—and there was a better way to organize the flow to help them find their way.

The Solution

We structured the new Babson site and its taxonomy to emulate how the most knowledgeable, empathetic admissions counselor would talk to a prospective student. Now, navigational items and site labels told the school’s entire story, in the right order—packaging it all together in a way students could easily relate to, while highlighting the school’s uniqueness.

That meant thinking hard about navigation patterns, making sure users can both find the section that’s right for them, and find the information they need within that section. Now, instead of moving arduously up, down and across a site, users could choose their own “home page” which contains all the information relevant to them. No more mixing undergrad with alumni. No hopping across the top nav to find the answers you needed. 

Through a taxonomy study with almost 100 users, we performed an A/B study to ensure that users could accomplish their most important tasks more easily than before. Then we took it one step further creating a fully interactive prototype that worked on both desktop and mobile versions of the site to test the usability of a fully contextualized experience.

• Before
• After

The Results

Looking at the 9-month year-over-year data, the overall visitor conversion rate across all properties improved by 60%.

The two sections that were our primary focus saw dramatic increases across behavioral and lead generation conversions.