Upon arriving at the landing page, students are greeted with a barrage of visual elements and information. This abundance of content, rather than being helpful, often resulted in confusion due to the website's complex design, difficult navigation routes, and the elusive nature of essential information.This resulted in students exerting more effort in deciphering the website's layout than in exploring the academic opportunities that Northeastern University offers.

When prospective students visit Northeastern University's landing page, they want to quickly understand what makes Northeastern unique, including its academic programs, student life, and the admissions process, so they can decide if it aligns with their educational and personal goals. Hence, the goal was to help prospective students see themselves thriving at Northeastern and make an informed decision about their future.

The analytics data revealed that visitors spend most of their time on the homepage scrolling from top to bottom glancing for info and crucial information such as academics and application guidelines being buried under menus didn’t help. Hence I added a section on the home screen to house the call-to-actions for the information.

We ideated on different ways to include the information on the home screen, and since most of the visitors spend their time on home screen, scroll to find the information scent and click on anything that’s promising. Hence, Critical information is moved to the home screen to improve it discoverability and opted in for a full-screen navigation to house different subsets of options.

To our delight, the internal testing revealed no significant usability concerns. This allowed us to shift our focus toward enhancing user experience through addressing edge cases and user feedback.

Key improvements included the integration of multimedia control for hero section, such as the ability to seamlessly play, pause between video and image content, prioritized efficient load times and consistent performance across mobile and web by opting for dynamic layouts through lightweight transitions instead of a more performance intensive video banner.

During the internal testing, development stated that playing a lengthy video caused significant load times and was glitching in lower bandwidths. Hence we opted to include a series of transitioning images and changed the headline to match what the section represents to cover different aspects of student life.

After working closely with development to bring the designs to life, we launched the test version of the website and crossed our fingers. At the inception, we documented two primary indicators of success; higher engagement and improved satisfaction. Fortunately, our users found the experience more engaging and satisfying than ever.

Since the launch, the website traffic was doubled and we saw an increase in clicks on Academics CTA by 16%, and navigation menu by 28%, and the signups to the newsletter by 10%. A win of this magnitude meant clearing the way to test new groups and potential visitors, create a robust system to expand further to more task-oriented areas like admissions, student life and charitable contribution.