INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE IDEATION & DESIGN

Creating a smooth navigation experience

I mapped out the original information architecture and used the users flow from Google Analytics to view which pages were the most and least visited.

As a team, we also discussed and created a card sorting round to gather feedback and decide what pages were necessary to keep and what could be moved or reworked into existing pages. A few of the team that participated in this discussion were part of the student volunteer group, so having their feedback as current students and former prospective students was helpful in deciding which information to highlight and which to remove.

We developed the first iteration of the IA that we used for approximately a year with the following changes & addition:

• Renamed ‘Innovation’ to ‘Curriculum’ - The 'Innovation' page outlined the curriculum, but it wasn’t getting a lot of visits, and we kept getting inquiries from people who weren't able to find the curriculum

• Renamed ‘Intensive Basic Training’ to ‘Piscine’ - We experimented with both of these names. The original name of the month-long admissions process was the ‘Piscine,’ meaning "swimming pool" in French. In a previous iteration of the website, it was renamed to "Intensive Basic Training". However, the new name created more confusion about how it fit into the 42SV curriculum, so I changed the name back to 'Piscine'.

• Addition of ‘Why 42’ Page - we added a direct link to this page because it provided the most information on the different aspects of 42SV that we received inquiries about.

An increase in visits, but a decrease in customer support tickets & drop offs

The third and final design further streamlined the IA and reworked a majority of the information on some of the removed pages into existing ones.

At this point, students had been talking about the 42SV program to those around them and the school had started to organically grow through word-of-mouth. Alumni had also started receiving jobs and advocating the curriculum and school to their peers. As a result, 42SV started becoming more well-known and gaining recognition. We decided we could improve the IA even more.

Using the data gathered from new and previous research and iterations, I made the following new changes:

• Created ‘The 42 Program’ page - We created this to become a combined page containing information about the different programs, curriculum, campus life, and managed to minimize the IA more

• ‘Blog’ - Condensed and moved news, student profiles, alumni profiles, and student projects into an easily accessible section

This final, simplified IA ultimately led to the improvement in direct admissions and decrease in customer support tickets and drop-offs that we were looking for.

LANDING PAGE REDESIGN

Creating an impactful landing page

Establishing legitimacy at first glance

We had some previous feedback about the landing page and its impact on first-time visitors. A couple of the main things we noted were that some people had a weak first impression of the page, and that the first glance didn’t help build the legitimacy that some people were looking for. We repeatedly heard from different users, especially from the family & friends group, that legitimacy of the 42SV program was something they sought out when they visited the website to find information.

Zero Tuition, Zero Teachers, Zero Classes, 100% Coding

The next step after we reviewed our research were rough sketch wireframes, and we spoke to some people again, including students, alumni, and the Corporate Relations team at 42SV. This helped us decide what was important to keep and highlight on the page and it also encompassed the five main groups that visited the website.

We constantly referred back to those groups as we were working on the home page . We kept asking ourselves, “Is this a landing page that could leave an impression on the people in those groups?”

After completing our final ideation and wrapping up the quick research, the following changes were made to the landing page:

• Tagline - I penned the tagline, “Zero Tuition, Zero Teachers, Zero Classes, 100% Coding” for the hero section of the landing page. Prospective and current students said the previous tagline “Disrupting Engineering Education” was too “buzzword-y” to sound serious, so they glossed over that and the video attached.

• Description - Added a one-sentence summary of 42SV underneath the tagline with a direct link to a 42SV program overview page

• Alumni Section - Since we did this redesign after the school had been open some time, the "Press" section was replaced with one that highlighted the companies our alumni were working for with a link leading to the ‘Alumni Profiles’ page. This was inspired by how other coding bootcamp’s displayed the same on their landing pages.

• Tagline Exploration - Added an informative section that expanded and quickly described the tagline more, as they’re the most frequently asked questions about 42SV

Constraint

The only constraint we had for redesigning the landing page was engineering it - the website was built on Wordpress and used a custom template. A couple sections were hard-coded in and couldn’t be moved, so we had to design around those. And with a little bit of previous knowledge in PHP(that Wordpress uses), I was also at least able to customize how some sections looked on the page.

OUTCOMES

A 12% increase in page visits, a 20% decrease in bounce rate, and an 8% increase in conversion rate

Compared to the previous year, there was a 12% increase in the number of people visiting relevant pages., a 20% decrease in the amount of drop-offs from the landing page, and an 8% increase in our conversion rate of people applying directly from the website. Based on our analytics, we found users were visiting the pages that contained the information of our most frequently asked questions more, and also noticed the improvement on the conversion rate.

CONCLUSION & LEARNINGS

My main takeaway from this project was the importance of user research. It's easy to make assumptions about what users might do based on our own experiences, but this can lead to inaccessible designs.

As a 42SV alumni myself, I had initially expected other users to browse the website similar to how I did when I applied to the school. While some did, many followed different (and unexpected!) flows entirely. Thanks to the user research we did, I was ultimately able to design a new flow that worked better for our website visitors. I’m also grateful that my first-ever design project was for a company with a mission I believed in.