Service Design Safari – Analyzing a University’s Website Using a Service Design Approach
A decrease in prospective students is expected in the next twenty years due to the declining birthrate, creating an increase in competitiveness between universities. In this project the University of Applied Sciences Niederrhein wanted to have an assessment of their existing website in order to identify opportunities to make it more attractive and easy-to-navigate for prospective students.
Background
The university’s website was originally launched in 2009 and, over the years, the amount of information on the site tripled due to the fact that all of the departments started to add information to their sub-pages. Although user experience was a theme in the initial website concept, it wasn’t executed coherently throughout, including on the departmental sub-pages.
Methodology & approach
The objective of this project was to develop a collective concept for the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science of the University of Applied Sciences Niederrhein. The focus was on user-centered feedback throughout the website, bearing in mind that this concept should also be applicable to all other departments of the university.
After a deep dive into the topic through self-exploration and research, the sedes –research team conducted qualitative interviews with all of the following stakeholders: designers and programmers of the university, prospective students, enrolled students and local companies. The team then explored how students, prospective students and companies use the current website and what they wish the website could offer. Furthermore, students were asked to prioritize existing content of the department according to their usefulness.
Based on the insights from the research the team conducted a workshop with the university project team to synthesize the lessons learned into a coherent concept.
Two different layout variations were created along with a list of actions that were easy to execute in a short timeframe and a sitemap that displayed the relevant content of the website in the new order. The challenge was to work with the existing design/layout and system requirements and a huge amount of information.
Results and Next Steps
As a result of the synthesis workshop sedes-research presented two different layout approaches that were developed for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In a next step these layouts will be refined together with the university project team and a working prototype for testing shall be finished by the end of the year.
Reflections
Service Design methodologies assisted greatly to identify the needs of the different user types. In addition, the co-creation workshops were crucial in the process of finding common ground between the different stakeholders involved in the development of the new website.
