The Site: Excelsior.edu is the Website for Excelsior College, a private, non-profit institution of higher education in Albany, New York, and an leading provider of online learning. Excelsior Has the largest school of nursing in the United States. (See the site)

Excelsior College engaged Enervision Media to assist with usability research and and evaluation of its Website. Excelsior offers higher educational programs, courses, and exams through this virtual campus, Excelsior.edu and the related student portal (MyExcelsior). However, the college was experiencing a number of difficulties in managing the very large site, and ha dreceived numerous complaints from students and prospective students unable to locate information related to applying for or enrolling in the college, or in managing their student experience.

"The Advisory group was spending so too time walking students through the basics on the site," remarked Michele Dutcher, Director of Web Content Development for Excelsior. "Because of all the technical issues, they were missing the opportunity to advise students on academic matters."

Following a Website Evaluation and 2-day benchmark Usability Test, the team identified several key issues:

Additionally, users were unclear about how and when to seek information on the main (public) site (Excelsior.edu), versus using the "MyExcelsior" student portal.

Following an in-depth site requirements discovery phase, we launched three major design phases: 1) a large-scale Information Architecture (IA) Redesign , 2) a Redesign of the User Interface for the public site, and 3) A complete redesign of the student portal.

Information Architecture Redesign

One of our first tasks was to analyze the site's existing structure. Our technology team captured the site's structure, and developed a custom tool to catalog and "tag" all pages based on whether the content was to be maintained as-is, edited down, collated with other pages, or discarded.

Our analysis revealed that nearly 50% of the site's 3,000+ pages consisted of duplicate content.

"The information architecture analysis helped us understand how much of the site's content was overlapping," said Dutcher. "This enabled us to reduce the site’s content to a much more manageable size."

Enervision created a new framework for the site with a more user-friendly structure.

"Much of the user interface was college-centric, not user-centric," said Meryl Enerson, principal consultant on the project. "By using what we had heard in user research, we were able to create a more logical and intuitive navigational framework for the students."

Redesign of the User Interface

A new look for the site consisted of ADA-compliant page templates, which allowed users to increase the font size, and to access the site with alternative browsers and slower computers (much of Excelsior's student user base are military personnel, so this was a core requirement).

Other information design changes made were:

We also developed an interactive prototype of the site (in XML), which acted as an interactive guide for the development of the final site, which runs on an Oracle database with LifeRay content management system.

Redesign of the Student Portal In tandem with the public site redesign, we developed a new Information Architecture and User Interface design for the student/faculty portal, MyExcelsior. A navigational structure with tabs was added to help student users find information on the portal. Excelsior's Web Content Development team then worked with each academic unit to flesh out content for the portal.

The Web Content Development team has been collecting and collating feedback from the various departments internally responsible for interfacing with students.

“We're very excited that Advisors and Admissions officers have been reporting far fewer issues,” reports Dutcher. “Additionally, Tech Support, now has fewer problems related to site issues.”

Dutcher is pleased with the feedback she has been getting on the new site from its numerous users, including some of the following comments:

“I used to get lost all the time on the site, having to click on four different links to get to the information I needed – now, I know exactly what I’m going to get when I click on something.”

"I am an Excelsior College alumnus and love the new website! It looks much more sleek and attractive, and seems to be organized more like the websites of more traditional institutions of higher learning"

"What I like most about the new Web site is that it is clearer, and doesn't look like one has to take a computer refresher course to navigate through it."

"Excellent job on the new design - the last design was way too crowded, making it almost impossible to find what I was looking for."