One lesson jumps out from the dozens of interviews and usability tests we’ve conducted with universities like Virginia Tech and Imperial College London: You should blow up your admissions site.Prospective students don’t click on “Prospective Students” or “Admissions” if their question is “What can I study here?” or “What will my life be like here?” They’ll click on “Academics” or “Student Life” (or any one of a dozen other things). Many institutions bury all the good stuff in their Admissions site and it never gets read.Your entire site should be your Admissions site. “Admissions” should be about the application process.
Smells like Carewords
This is a great example of “carewords” in action. Also called “scent” or “trigger” words, carewords are the words in someone’s head as they pursue a goal. Researchers at Xerox PARC and other institutions have discovered that when people look for information, they behave just like bees seeking nectar. Certain words give off scent for the nectar of a reader’s goal. Carewords draw the reader’s eyes as they zip around the page. Let’s say Colleen comes to your site with this question in her mind: “I’m interested in biology and environmental issues. What could I study here?”Colleen’s carewords include:
- majors
- academics
- areas of study
- science
- biology
- environment
- departments
If she sees one of these words on your home page she’s likely to click on it. She doesn’t necessarily expect to see “Biology” right on the home page. But she expects each careword she clicks on to lead her to more specific words. If she doesn’t see them, the trail goes cold and she clicks the “Back” button.The problem is, “Admissions” smells like a good place to find the answer to “How do I apply to this school?” On many school sites she’d see “Academics” first and click on that. This trail would probably lead her to a list of schools or colleges, and eventually departments. Riddle Me This. To get to the information about the major, Colleen would have to know where Biology or Environmental Sciences falls within your organizational structure. Sometimes that’s straightforward, but what happens when you have a “College of Science” and a “College of Agriculture and Life Sciences?” Which should she click?Once she’s solved that riddle, she’s at the mercy of the departmental web site – which may or may not be consistent with the rest of your site. Carewords Change as You Go. At this point, Colleen’s carewords list changes. She’s found the Biology Major page, but she has further questions. Her new list includes things like:
- faculty
- courses
- research
- requirements
- clubs or student organizations
- career or job options
- financial aid
- scholarships
- contact
Do these words appear on your major pages?
Why do schools put all the good stuff under “Admissions?”
It usually has to do with control. The Admissions Office staff are focused on serving the needs of prospective students. The Biology Department has lots of priorities - prospective students are just one group they serve. If Admissions wants to put up good information about the Biology major, it’s easier to post it within the Admissions site than to coordinate this with the Biology Department.Admissions often ends up creating a carefully controlled site for prospective students. Every word is crafted and every photo selected to give just the right view of the school.The Admissions Office should still take the lead in making sure their school provides great content for prospective biology majors. But for this content to be effective, it has to live outside the Admissions web site. There are two possible solutions to this challenge:
- Build a “Majors A to Z” section and link this from both your home page and your Academics page.
- Include an alphabetical list of majors, linked to pages that describe each major.
- Each major page can link to its department for more information. It can also link to relevant information on careers, scholarships, student organizations, etc.
- Create “aliases” for major names. One school we know calls their fashion design program “Apparel, Housing and “Resource Management.” Huh? Aliases allow you to list majors in the language of a high school student. Another example is “Political Science” or “International Affairs.” Which does your school use? This is important for search engines too.
- Collaborate with each department to refine the information about their majors. Yeah, this is hard. It’s also worth it. It’s a social and organizational challenge, but everyone involved will benefit. You should still create a master A to Z list of majors.
Why this matters to every web site, not just schools
Companies and other organizations do the same thing - they arrange their sites according to the organization’s internal structure, rather than around the goals and carewords of their audiences. Then they lose sight of “What’s next?” after someone reaches a goal page.
Learn more about carewords
If you’d like to learn more about the whole idea of carewords and information scent, check out some of these resources: Designing for the Scent of Information, a white paper from User Interface Engineering Killer Web Content, a book by Gerry McGovern. Includes details about how to discover your audience’s carewords.Chris Olston, Ed H. Chi. ScentTrails: Integrating Browsing and Searching on the Web. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 10, Part 3, pp. 177–197. Sept, 2003. ACM Press. Virginia Tech’s A to Z Guide to Majors.