University of Ottawa rethinks UX in website revamp

The University of Ottawa’s new website isn’t just a cosmetic redesign. It’s a cosmic rethinking of the school’s online presence – and it’s all based on a UX design approach.

An online overhaul was long overdue. When U of O launched its site back in 1997, Bill Clinton was starting his second presidential term, the first Harry Potter novel was hitting bookstores and Steve Jobs had just returned to a sinking ship named Apple.

Despite a small-scale update in 2012, U of O’s website still needed work.

“We did a little refresh but could only affect the top layer. To go deeper than that we had to transform the whole approach,” says Nichole McGill, director of web communications at the University of Ottawa.

Rebooting a website after 15 years is no overnight task, especially when it draws 4.6 million clicks a month and 51.5 million visits per year.

McGill knew the key lay in user experience. But unlocking UX is daunting for a website with such varied users: students, prospective students, parents, faculty, staff, news media, alumni, donors, researchers and corporate partners. On top of that, as the largest bilingual university in the world, its website must be fully functional in French and English.

UX was gauged by crunching analytics from the site and also consulting real users – including over 5,000 students – about what worked and what didn’t.

“We did internal interviews with all the (university’s) important stakeholders. They got the business point of view of what they needed to communicate (on the site). Then they did one-on-one user surveys and usability testing with the students, future students and the guidance counselors. Journalists, donors, alumni, professors and employees (were consulted) as well,” says McGill.

A major common complaint? Complicated menu and navigation features. Another was the lack of cohesion between the university’s main website and separate sub-sites for various faculties and departments.

The biggest shocker? The top reason alumni visited the original website wasn’t to look up old classmates, homecoming events or ways to donate money. It was to search for courses. McGill says those kinds of surprises – the nuances missed by analytics alone – are the reason the best UX design includes human feedback, not just hard numbers.

“You can think and make assumptions” about users, she says, but “analytics only gets you so far.”

The new website debuted in November 2013. This one’s designed with mobile devices in mind. The most noticeable thing is what’s not there: clutter. There are just four main icons dominating the middle of the home page; smaller sub-categories sit across the top and bottom. Every element on the page is simple – even if getting them there wasn’t. An original list of the top 400 tasks among site visitors was whittled down to 75. That list was refined even further through user surveys and testing.

The re-launched website is a better experience for the people who manage it, too. It has a new open source Drupal content management system. (All U of O sub-sites are gradually moving to Drupal as well, for more cohesive design and navigation.) Drupal makes it easier to integrate external web content into the university’s websites, regardless of the code it’s built on.

The Big Overhaul is over. But the university is still consulting users. The new site has already been tweaked based on comments from the feedback section. Tweets and other social media posts have also become part of the ongoing UX design process – in the most public, immediate sense imaginable.

“If it isn’t great,” says McGill, “your users will tell you right away.”