How to go from good to great: A case study on redesigning the University of Michigan Medical School website

After a major overhaul three years ago, the University of Michigan Medical School’s flagship website for prospective students was getting glowing feedback. Great news, right? But … now what? What comes after “good”?

This talk presents a case study of how one school dug in to a new round of user research to deepen their understanding of the application journey of prospective medical students.By mapping the information-seeking behavior of prospective students, they learned how the lens of time could give new insights into how to organize and present information to users as part of a content strategy.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Apply the concept of a customer journey to an academic setting in order to uncover insights into how applicants use online information.
• Translate Office of Admissions recruiting goals into a user research plan.
• Analyze qualitative data to identify opportunities for tailoring web content to distinct user needs and preferences.
• Identify “genres” of content preferred by users, and turn those into a structured content model in a CMS.