CASE STUDY

The Challenge

The Clackamas website architecture and back-end configuration was slowly growing unorganized, cluttered, and difficult to use. Elements of the home page were outdated and not being utilized by web visitors. In addition, students were having difficulty finding essential information, and Clackamas' goal was to improve mobile navigation to make it more user-friendly and easy to navigate. Challenges also existed with the integration of 3rd-party data.

A large part of that challenge was in developing a strategy to best integrate that data seamlessly into different parts of the website and portal. With all these challenges, the primary goal of Clackamas was to improve the guided pathways throughout the site, specifically for students, in order to make it easier for them to quickly and easily find their focus areas and explore, choose, plan, and complete their current programs or successfully transfer.

The Solution

Discover

To make the most effective use of project efforts, an in-depth discovery phase was planned and implemented. Starting where a previous vendor left off, Enqbator reviewed previous reports, assessments, and analytics data for gaps in knowledge. From there Enqbator did a “deep dive” to gather all additional needed information. The Enqbator team also worked together with the Clackamas staff to gather information about goals, vision, and pain points by conducting stakeholder and student interviews. To help understand the needs of the Clackamas' audience, Enqbator, in collaboration with the school’s marketing project teams and the college’s institutional research team, developed a user survey to gather feedback from current students, prospective students, faculty, staff, and community members. The survey brought in over 700 responses and helped guide the resulting design and development efforts.

Define

Enqbator distilled the information gathered from the discovery and ensured all the needs from the initial discussions were addressed. In addition, personas were created based on real user data collected from the discovery phase. These personas were then kept front and center to ensure the needs and goals of Clackamas' users were at the forefront of decisions.

Design

From there, the Enqbator design team developed wireframes for the home page, program pages, and program landing/search page - all based on the findings from the user research. After revising the wireframes, data-driven final designs were created which went through extensive review from the Clackamas project and marketing teams and their WAG (Web Accessibility Group) before approval.

Develop

In addition to the front-end designs, Enqbator developed a high-fidelity prototype to conduct usability testing. Testing with students was completed to get additional feedback, confirm the designs were going in the right direction and meeting user needs, and identify any potential improvements. After the analysis of usability testing feedback, updates were made, and the rest of the development took place.

Deploy

After development, thorough testing was performed by the Enqbator team and then reviewed and approved by the Clackamas team. Finally, the Enqbator team worked collaboratively with the Clackamas team to ensure a smooth and painless launch for the refreshed site.

The Result

The positive feedback from students and staff at Clackamas was immediate and proved the updates were effective. The work performed by both the Clackamas and Enqbator teams resulted in the following enhancements:

• Degree Search: New and improved degree search with extensive and easy to use filtering options to allow users to browse and search degrees faster and easier.
• Content Optimization: The content for all degree pages was reviewed, edited or rewritten to optimize engagement and include keywords for SEO.
• Consistent Layouts: Clean and easy to manage templates for the degree pages to ensure consistency on all 97+ degree pages.
• Clean and Modern Design: A redesigned Home Page, Program Landing/Search Page and 97+ Program Pages. The whole site also obtained a refreshed look with a new template for the main and sub navigation, header and footer. Along with this came several widgets with refreshed styles to match the new design.
• Streamlined Student Pathways: Created guided pathways by making important degree information more prominent and bringing the Educational Focus Areas to key areas throughout the site to help students find their focus areas and explore, choose, plan, and complete their current programs or successfully transfer.
• Custom Modules/Content Types: New widgets and modules developed to display all the degree information on the degree pages as well as the search page - all while making the backend degree content easy to manage and update.
• Language Translations: Integration with GTranslate provides visitors with language options for translating the site to English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Russian, and Ukranian.