Website User Research and Content Strategy, February 2022
Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Registrar’s Office
PROJECT ROLES: Product Owner, Content Strategist, UX Researcher
The Registrar’s Office needed a modern, inviting, responsive, and accessible website that reflected the warmth of our in-person team. We wanted to create a trusted digital experience to help our audience of 15,000 students, faculty, and staff complete transactions quickly and easily.
Discovery and User Research
I managed an extensive discovery and user research process so we could make data-informed decisions throughout the site build phase of the project.
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Objective: Gain basic understanding of stakeholder expectations for the project; use findings to inform project goals.
Key Findings:
The website should support the Registrar’s Office by presenting us as a trusted and reliable partner; we should have accurate and timely information on all areas of the site.
We have a wide variety of constituents; while students are an important audience, faculty and staff use the website heavily and we should prioritize their needs equally when building the site.
The current website is difficult to navigate; content isn’t organized well; it is difficult to direct constituents to answers on the website when they have questions.
A good website will help reduce email tickets and calls to the office; would free up staff time.
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Objective: Understand how constituents have been using our site and what content they are visiting frequently.
Key Findings:
Peak Traffic: The website received the most traffic in August and January which correlates with the start of fall and spring term.
Sessions and Visitors: 341k sessions, with about 2 pages visited per session. Average visit duration is one minute and 21 seconds.
Engagement: More than half (232k/341k) of sessions last 0-10 seconds. 71% of them only stay on one page. Just 14% visit a second page.
Search: Almost 55% of our traffic comes from organic searches (Google), 20% is from a referral, and 19% is direct.
Devices:
63% of site visitors are using a desktop
35% a mobile device (72% of mobile users navigate with an iPhone)
1% use a tablet
Top Pages: Most visitors come to the site to review academic calendar dates.
Harvard College Academic Calendar (16%)
Homepage
Ten Year Calendar
Spring 2021 Calendar
Order Transcript
FAS Courses
Early Shopping and Course Registration
Graduation & Diplomas
Forms & Petitions
John Harvard and Harvard College Scholarships (2%)
Top Site Search Terms: Site visitors had the most difficulty finding information about the topics below.
Verification
Pass fail
Pass/fail
TAP
Audit
Cross registration
Course catalog
Leave of absence
Courses
Grades
Help Center
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Objective: Measure the accessibility and quality assurance of the current website using Sitemprove; use scores as benchmarks to gauge the effectiveness of the new website.
Key Findings:
Digital Certainty Index: 77.0
Quality Assurance: 79.7
Accessibility: 65.3
SEO: 86.1
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Objective: See what content is valued by stakeholders, understand what content we can leave behind, and identify who owns each page.
Key Findings:
Our site includes 231 total pages.
32% of existing pages are current and should be migrated to the new site.
33% of existing pages are outdated or unnecessary.
58% of pages include information relevant to students.
52% of pages include information relevant to faculty.
68% of pages include information relevant to staff.
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Objective: Analyze 100 email tickets in the Registrar’s Office department inbox. Determine various audiences, user needs, and identify key terms used by these constituent groups. Use the language gleaned from this exercise when drafting content during the site build phase of the project.
Key findings:
Audience groups identified:
Major staff groups include: Curriculum Coordinators, Program Coordinators, and Residential Staff.
Major faculty groups include: Instructors, Teaching Fellows, Head Teaching Fellows
Major student groups include: Graduate students, Harvard College students
Students used the phrase “enroll in courses” more frequently than they used “register for courses.”
Key topics identified included: courses, diplomas, summer, dissertations, grades, and concentrations.
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Objective: In collaboration with the Harvard Library User Research Center, we conducted an open card sort using Optimal Workshop to learn how students categorized the information on our website and the vocabulary they used to describe each grouping.
Key Findings:
23 students participated in the card sort exercise and were asked to sort approximately 30 different card topics.
Key categories determined by students included:
Classes (or Courses)
Graduation
Physical Spaces (Classes, Roombook)
Student Records
New Student Information
Students said that cards that included jargon were confusing. For example, they didn’t know what “take exam in absentia” and “activate advanced standing” meant.
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Objective: Learn what website features would be helpful for daily operations. Obtain examples of websites that staff see as successful and/or useful.
Key Findings:
Improve site search functionality: “I like to search in the search bar, but the information that comes up is really outdated, so I have to go in myself and look it up”
Reduce clicks for academic calendar: “I like that the dates are imported but don’t like the fact that you need to keep clicking to see what the event is (description is cut off with … and have to keep clicking into it), it’s not efficient, and it’s not easy to read quickly”
Better direction to the appropriate email queue: “The directory should expand to include general email queues and explain what each area does, e.g. what does Enrollment Services help with, then define further who can help with what area: who people are and what roles are.”
Reduce number of images on the site: “Glossy hero images just distract me from getting to the key information and just force me to scroll. I don’t like them.”
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Objective: Review 16 well-designed and/or ivy league institution Registrar’s Office websites and determine common features.
Key Findings:
50% of peers had an audience guide that allowed users to filter content based on their identity
38% had 7+ main menu categories; 31% of peers had 5 main menu categories
38% of peers had a glossary outlining an alphabetical list of key concepts
31% of peers had a notification bar to flag student information system issues and COVID-19 updates
31% of peers had an external link indicator to let the audience know they were leaving the website
13% included pages specifically designed for parents and family members
Content Development
We developed a content strategy to address several issues identified during the discovery and user research process.
Issue: Visitors had difficulty finding information quickly on our old website because current pages were text-heavy and full of jargon – they didn’t want to spend time digging around for the information they needed. Additionally, staff had difficulty directing users to key pieces of information on the page when responding to email tickets and phone calls because the pages were so long.
Solution: We created a table of contents at the top of every subpage called “What’s on this page?” that contains anchor links that let users jump to key sections. This allows visitors to quickly access relevant information.
We also rewrote each web page using Plain Language and broke up lengthy pages using formatting such as bulleted lists and callouts.
Issue: During our content audit, we learned that site visitors were forced to read through the page to find out if the content was relevant to them – out of context the audience for each page was unclear. The Registrar’s Office serves a large and diverse audience. Faculty, staff, students, and alumni from Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences all use different areas of our website. We concluded that this could be especially frustrating to users who were landing on our site from a Google search (55% of all visitors, according to our Google Analytics review).
Solution: We addressed this using a few different strategies –
We added a “Who is this for?” section to the top of each page that specifies intended audience. For example, the Submit your Dissertation page is for “GSAS students who are currently writing their dissertation or preparing to submit one.”
We choose words that connoted the audience to label each section in the main menu. For example, the “Learning” section contains information for students, and the “Teaching” section contains information for instructional staff.
We created audience-focused pages that list all pages relevant to each audience group. For example, the Alumni page includes links to the Transcripts, Diplomas, and Student Records pages.
Issue: Our constituents emailed multiple email queues at once to get answers to their questions because they didn’t know which email to contact. The Registrar’s Office manages 7 different email queues based on the services we provide. Receiving the same ticket in multiple email queues increased our response time considerably and we often duplicated efforts to answer the questions.
Solution: We created a “Need Assistance?” section on each subpage that shows which email to contact based on the service our constituents need. We also use this section to direct our audience to other departments within Harvard. On our People page, we tag all staff by the issues they can assist with in case constituents need to reach out to staff members directly.
Issue: Large hero images increased the amount of time visitors spent scrolling and did not add anything significant to the content.
Solution: We decided to forgo including photos. This reduces scrolling and page length, and keeps content accessible.
Issue: We wanted staff to be able to find the calendars on our new website as quickly as possible. Based on the analytics from our old website, our Academic Calendar pages were by far our most popular content. The pages included the Harvard College Academic Calendar, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Academic Calendar, and Ten Year Academic Calendar.
Solution: We combined all calendars into one page, and added Calendars as the first menu item for easy access. We also created a black button style for the menu item to make it stand out even more.
Content Management
Documentation and training have helped us keep the website consistent.
During our content audit, we discovered that we had inconsistent formatting and tone across the entire website along with a large number of pages that were deeply buried in the site navigation. All 25 Registrar’s Office staff members had access to our former website and could update and add pages to the site, but we didn’t have any content guidelines. This resulted in a disorganized website with a lot of outdated information.
To help keep the new website’s content consistent, I created the Registrar’s Office Website User Manual. This document outlines our goals for the site, content strategy, and instructions for using the website’s custom CSS classes. For example, if someone needs to add a callout style to a subpage, there are step-by-step instructions that they can refer back to any time they need to use the callout CSS class.
I invited 8 staff members who were interested in managing content for their specific units (e.g. Academic Planning) to join our web team and receive training on updating the website. Our web team meets biweekly to discuss content strategy. We also have our own Microsoft Teams channel – it’s a space to flag any issues with the site and ask quick questions.
Site Management and Optimization
Our weekly website report measures site performance to ensure the site is meeting the goals we established in our original project plan.
I created a Google Data Studio Website Report based on feedback from the Registrar’s Office senior team that allows us to measure our site performance and learn what content interests our visitors. For example, the Registrar wanted to see what topics users were searching for, so I created an Internal Website Search report so he could see the most popular terms.
The report defines each metric and how we can use it to evaluate our success, so it’s easy for anyone to understand even if they aren’t familiar with Google Analytics.
It’s automatically delivered weekly to our senior team and our website team.
We also use the report to measure the effectiveness of any major changes to the website. For example, before the site launch, we added archived Course Catalogs and Enrollment Reports to a page titled Archive. We wanted to keep the documents on one web page to reduce the number of menu items.
After seeing low traffic to the Archive page and receiving numerous tickets from users who could not find the archived Course Catalogs and Enrollment Reports, we created a new Courses page and a Reports page.
Reflections
Stakeholder interviews dramatically transformed the project direction. These conversations were immensely helpful in learning about our team’s expectations for the website, and they resulted in some of our best content strategy ideas.
Detailed documentation is essential to maintaining consistent content and design across the site. Pairing the documentation with training sessions allowed us to bring more content editors into the site management process.
Writing content using Plain Language helped us create useful information that feels welcoming. We’ve received positive feedback from our audience that the site finally feels like it is written for them.