Babson.edu Redesign

Creating a clear path for every audience

babson.edu

We thought about where the important information goes so you don’t have to.

  • Alignment Workshop

    We bring stakeholders together in structured, facilitated sessions that are SWOT-like in spirit. Together we surface priorities, work through disagreement in the room and land on a shared path forward.

  • In-Depth Interviews

    Through deep-dive interviews we bring users’ unique voices directly into the design process, surfacing the real behaviors and the motivations behind their actions.

  • Competitive Analysis

    We study your competitors and the best practices beyond your category to establish the baseline users expect, and to find the openings that let you differentiate.

  • Taxonomy

    Using a mix of open and closed card sorting, tree testing, and first-click studies, we build an information architecture people can navigate with confidence.

  • Experience Strategy

    We evaluate internal perceptions, user goals, and best practices to find what makes your experience worth having. Then we turn it into an action plan for what comes next.

  • Prototyping

    If a picture is a thousand words, a high-fidelity prototype is the entire story. Testing with one gets us past hypothetical reactions and into real behavior, the kind of feedback we can actually trust. With AI-assisted prototypes, we go even deeper, real data, real interactions, insight we couldn’t get any other way.

  • Design Studios

    We bring cross-functional teams into a room to solve a problem, and ensure every voice—loud or soft—gets heard. Together they sketch, critique, and align on the ideas worth pursuing.

  • Visual Design

    Through imagery, messaging, color and typography, we deliberate over pixels, consistency, readability, contrast, accessibility and creativity.

  • Usability Testing

    We ride-along as users navigate digital experiences while trying to achieve their goals. Sometimes we ask probing questions. Sometimes we just observe. Unearthing friction early costs a conversation. Catching it later could cost the business.

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. 

A fully reimagined experience to reflect the needs of the audiences across devices
A fully reimagined experience to reflect the needs of the audiences across devices

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.

Large sample user research to optimize the taxonomy against tasks
Large sample user research to optimize the taxonomy against tasks

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.

Bringing users into the process at key points in the design to ensure we're tracking to their needs
Bringing users into the process at key points in the design to ensure we're tracking to their needs

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.

The audience needed to pogo up and down and across main site areas
An architecture centralized around audiences and their needs
A new menu system that enables efficient navigation, whatever the device.
A new menu system that enables efficient navigation, whatever the device.

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.

Graduate Section

Session Time

20%

Bounce Rate

18%

Form Fill Conversions

35%

Led Gen Registrations

83%

Undergraduate Section

Session Time

2%

Bounce Rate

0%

Clicks to Common App

53%

Led Gen Registrations

115%

We are so glad we partnered with ZeroDegrees

…to help improve the user experience of our site’s structure and navigation. Through the various workshops and alignment activities that ZeroDegrees facilitated, we were able to make informed strategic decisions about our path forward. The results show the incredible impact the new site is having!

Kerry Salerno, Babson Chief Marketing Officer