This is the second of my two-part post recounting what we learned in a recent series of online focus groups on website design and navigation. The objective of the research was to gather input to guide development of a client’s new website. Participants were high school students from the Midwest reacting and responding to the client site and four carefully selected comparator websites.
We often use online focus groups to understand how and why target audiences respond to various types of communications. Like all of our focus group work, these were designed for a specific school, but much of what we learned applies to any college website.
In the first post, What Students Really Want (click here), we laid out four factors that the focus group participants indicated were shaping their reactions when they visited a home page for the first time:
- Design, content, color that define a strong personality
- High-impact, descriptive photography
- Friendly content that gets to the point fast
- Clear navigation to find desired information easily
With regard to #4 above, careful interpretation of the user-group input identified two categories of information that prospects looked for in the initial website visit to see if they were interested enough to learn more: Info they needed, and info they wanted.
Information that students need encompasses “Threshold Factors” that determine whether or not your institution can make it to the short list of schools that can be considered. User group input showed that the pathways to Threshold information have to be clearly identified and easy to follow from your home page:
- Program listings
- Tuition and fees
- Financial aid
- Location
While you need to have clearly defined pathways to such information, it doesn’t necessarily mean that program listings, tuition and fees, location, and financial aid information should be at the very top of your navigational scheme.
Here’s why: Focus group participants identified a second critical category of initial information – information they wanted to see. These are Motivational Factors” that get prospects excited and energized enough to stay on your site and to find out more:
- Campus setting and student life
- Scholarships and Awards
- Reputation
- Brand personality and promise
Based on the user group input, shaping the user experience in a way that blends both Threshold and Motivational factors in a seamless and compelling way is the sine qua non for an elegant, effective student prospect website.
The more powerfully you communicate Motivational elements on the home page and throughout the pathways that prospects use to navigate to Threshold information – through engaging student-life images, concise brand messages, teasers about scholarship opportunities, designs that convey distinctive personality, and reputation-building proof points – the more successful your site will be in generating inquiries and interest.
The trick is to communicate this sort of branded motivational information pervasively on your site in short, intriguing bits and pieces so that prospects are interested enough to get to the information they feel they need. And once they arrive at Threshold information, you want that information to be absorbed within the context of your most motivational branding environment.
Posted by Bob 
