Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
Role (Junior UX Designer and Researcher): Client Communication, Usability Interviews, UX Design, UX Research
The University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy is one of the top academic institutions for public policy education and research in the world. As a Junior UX Designer and Researcher at Sandstorm Design, I worked directly with representatives from the Harris School of Public Policy to perform a redesign of the website.
Problem:
How do we increase enrollment at Harris?
Solution:
By showcasing successful outcomes and quantitative impact from the school.
Balancing Accessibility with User and Stakeholder Feedback
Upon entering the site, the big elephant in the room was the video on the front page. From an accessibility perspective, my team and I could not recommend keeping it due to possible exclusion against those with motion sickness and slow internet. However, our stakeholders and data from the user interviews showed that there was a strong desire to keep it. As a result, my team and I developed a solution that reduced the size of the video, along with adding in a pause button.
Data from Usability Testing
This was one of the most data-driven projects I’ve worked on. Ironically, it was also discovered during usability testing and user interview sessions that our stakeholders LOVED quantitative data even more than our stakeholders.
“Should I enroll here?”
According to the usability interviews conducted, prospective students’ decisions came down to whether they believed that they would see a return on investment from Harris. From the usability testing, we were able to break down the different factors that prospective students considered before applying or enrolling at Harris. My team clarified these concerns with prominent data visualizations. Some of these concerns include:
Salary outcome
Employment rate
Cost of attendance
Time of decision
Location
Ease of application
Institutional Excellence
The University of Chicago is one of the prestigious schools in the world. As a result, there is always groundbreaking news and research coming out of its schools. My team was responsible for designing a new page to keep prospective students, current students, researchers, and faculty up-to-date with what is happening at Harris.
International Students
One demographic that particularly had concerns with the application process was international students. This is extremely critical as a HUGE percentage of the student population was foreign. In fact, half of the participants in the usability testing pool were international students. As a result of this, a solution was developed to clarify the application requirements for international students.
Other Stakeholders
A major goal of the redesign was to bring under consideration other stakeholders that are not students or prospective students. These other stakeholders will likely be academics including:
Prospective professors
Current professors
Researchers
Participants for Usability Testing
Our initial hypothesis was that the demographic split would be between international students and domestic students. An even split from the two groups were recruited as participants. Participants were recruited by the university. The sessions were conducted on Zoom.
Findings
Our research led us to the conclusion that our hypothesis was incorrect. The biggest demographic factor was between users who applied to multiple colleges and users who only applied to Harris. Users who only applied to Harris were more likely to be working professionals while users who applied to multiple colleges were more likely to be occupational students.
6 out of 10 of our participants applied to multiple colleges.
4 out of 10 of our participants only applied to Harris,
Multiple Applications
Users who applied to multiple colleges had a much more extensive user journey. Not only did they do in-depth research about other competing programs, they also did further research into the University of Chicago than their counterparts.
Only Harris
Users who only applied to Harris did not interact with as much of the website as their counterparts. In the research, we discovered that users who only applied to Harris already had prior information and did not have to go through as many web pages. While their counterparts did intensive research immediately after the decision letter, these users waited until the financial aid decision came in.
Impact
I departed from Sandstorm during the development phase of this project. As a result, I was not responsible for tracking or analyzing the project’s impact. However, I can see from publicly available data that the project did not boost enrollment at Harris, although Harris did see an increase in enrollment of international students. If I was responsible for continuing work on this project, I would be curious to see the difference in numbers of applicants and acceptance into the program. I would also track if there is a significant change in task rates or a shift in use cases.