Making an iMpact: redesigning a business school Web site around performance metrics

ABSTRACT

The University of Michigan Business School went through a substantial redesign in 2002--2003 of their site of over 3,000 pages, with a focus on increased ease of use, clean, professional design, improved branding, reduction of Web sprawl, and integration of their public site with their intranet, called ì iMpact.î The site serves a range of users with varying needs, including faculty, students, staff, alumni, prospective students, media, and recruiters.Our redesign process was grounded in a metrics-based user testing approach that set targets for various measurements, such as task completion rate, and compared these to usersí performance on their previous site and the sites of their competitors. Task completion rate, for instance, went from 61.7% on their former site to 92.5% on the final redesigned site. Continuous testing provided detailed feedback, and measurement enabled us to reduce project risks while demonstrating substantial improvements versus competitorsí Web sites.

REFERENCES

• 1: T. Brinck , D. Gergle, The Design of Banking Websites: Lessons from Iterative Design, Proceedings of the Third Asian Pacific Computer and Human Interaction, p.386, July 15-17, 1998
• 2: Tom Brinck , Darren Gergle , Scott D. Wood, Usability for the Web: designing Web sites that work, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2001
• 3: Withrow, J., Brinck, T., and Speredelozzi, A. Comparative Usability Evaluation for an e-Government Portal, Diamond Bullet Design Report #U1-00-2, Ann Arbor, MI. December 2000.
• 4: General Services Administration. Section 508: The Road to Accessibility. < http://www.section508.gov/>.
• 5: Tom Brinck , Erik Hofer, Automatically evaluating the usability of web sites, CHI '02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/506443.506652]

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
brand building, experience strategy, graphic design, information architecture, interaction design, intranet design, multidisciplinary design/interdisciplinary design, performance metrics, user experience, user interface design, user research, user-centered design/human-centered design, visual design, web site design.