What Students Are Telling You About Your Website Design

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:

1. Design, content, color that define a strong personality
2. High-impact, descriptive photography
3. Friendly content that gets to the point fast
4. 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:

1. Program listings
2. Tuition and fees
3. Financial aid
4. 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:

1. Campus setting and student life
2. Scholarships and Awards
3. Reputation
4. 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.

What Students Really Want

I just spent a few days reviewing and analyzing input from a series of recent online focus groups.  The focus groups were with college-bound high school students – second-year to fourth-year – who we had asked to react and respond to four carefully selected college websites.

Online focus groups are a great – low-cost – way to crawl inside the heads of your target audiences and understand how and why they respond to your most important recruitment tool – your website.  You should think about doing these on a regular basis.

The Test
We had the focus group participants visit four comparator websites (plus the client’s site) and react to a series of questions about each.  We selected four very different websites for our prospects to review:

1. One was very sophisticated, with high-concept design using graphic treatment instead of imagery, clear navigation, and an array of multimedia and the latest applications on second-level pages;
2. One was businesslike, with a traditional block layout built around a high-impact, attention-grabbing image and prominent text/image teasers guiding users along focused second-level information paths;
3. One displayed a distinctive and inviting brand personality carefully targeting the priority audience segment with inviting, colorful design and intriguing headlines, followed by an extensive list of links to all kinds of information;
4. One was visually busy, filled to brimming with images and eclectic design and typography spaces, news, spotlights, highlighted by conspicuous, inventive links for specific audience segments.

Which of these would you guess got the highest marks for interest and usability?

Winners and Losers
While each of the sites generated positive comments, two of them jumped out at prospects as far-and-away superior in interest, impact, and usability:  The second and third of the four website described above (I’ll send you the urls we tested if you email me by clicking here)!   Surprised?

The website that communicated a distinctive brand personality (#3 above) created the strongest positive impact and “buzz” with participants.  And to address the obvious objection, it even fared well with those who weren’t in the target segment and didn’t resonant with the personality!  Everyone appreciated the fact that the college conveyed pride and openness about their distinctive world view.  “You know right away what’s important to them, and what they stand for.  That’s great,” said one.

Unfortunately, that website lost its appeal just as fast due to its extensive list of poorly organized links, which required too much reading to be worth the effort!   The students didn’t bother with trying to find information; they simply gave up, and fast.

The second winner in our mini-sweepstakes was the traditionally designed workmanlike site that gained power from a single, high-quality branded image and clean navigation.  Based in large part on the impact of the great image, students said the layout projected sophistication, prestige, and elegance.  And unlike #3, this site kept visitors engaged by presenting a clear, logical information flow.  Students liked the pathways to important information in quick, intuitive steps.

The biggest loser was the sophisticated, high-concept site (#1 above).  High school students are so used to reading and interpreting imagery that the absence of it turned them off.   They immediately judged the site to be boring and unimaginative despite the attempt at a chic graphic style.  Too bad, since most participants weren’t interested enough to get to the next level, which was engaging, attractive, fun, and filled with innovative multimedia attractions.   What a waste!

The moral of our focus group study?

Four basic factors have huge impact within 20–30 seconds of a prospect opening your page on their browser:

1. Conveying your unique brand personality through design, content, color
2. Strong, branded imagery that intrigues and/or conveys emotion
3. Concise, conversational copy that gets to the point fast
4. Clear navigational paths to the information that students want most

OK, so that brings up another crucial question:  What information do prospects want most from a website?

The answer – which may surprise you – will have to wait until my next blog post…stay tuned!

Measure Brand Equity and Satisfaction

Serious brand managers know that successful branding hinges not just on how well and broadly you communicate your brand, but on whether or not your organization actually lives up to what you’re promising.

So wouldn’t it be great to have a low-cost survey that gives you hard data how well your organization is actually delivering on your brand platform? And at the same time quantifies how resonant and motivational your brand messaging is among your most important constituents?

That kind of sophisticated quantitative data is now possible at a cost low enough that any organization, regardless of size, can conduct the survey as often as needed. For the first time, brand managers can quantify progress in brand understanding and internalization and can even compile longitudinal data on the growth in internal brand equity!

An online survey methodology developed by EMG quantifies the depth of understanding and the strength of your brand among current students as well as faculty, staff, and alumni. It’s a powerful tool for marketers to measure both resonance and impact of brand messaging and delivery.

The quantitative research process identifies the strengths and weaknesses of brand commitment among various internal constituencies in order to plan effective internal communications strategies and tactics.

It quantifies how strongly each audience is internalizing the brand platform, how resonant the platform is among each group, and where and how the brand helps shape organizational behavior:

• Is the brand promise/platform being communicated to students and prospects?
• Is it resonant and motivational for them both?
• Do internal constituencies believe the brand promise is real or just a slogan?
• Does it shape/improve student life and the academic experience?
• Do faculty and staff know, understand, support the brand platform?
• Are they using it to shape the student experience and improve quality?
• Are brand messages getting through to alumni?
• What impact are they having?
• Do alumni reinforce these messaging points?

Important questions. Questions that used to cost thousands of dollars and many months of work to answer. But this new online survey process makes it easy and fast to obtain this kind of quantifiable data, and for less than $2,000.

It’s as simple as customizing the survey instrument to reflect your unique environment and brand platform, inviting stakeholders to participate online, and placing the survey link on your website. That’s it. The rest of the survey process – including data analysis – is done for you. The survey report includes cross-tabulations by segment to understand how each constituency perceives the brand and how well they are internalizing and supporting it through their own actions and behaviors.

Sign up for our October Brand Bounce newsletter if you’d like to get more information about this incredibly powerful – and cost effective – survey tool.

Analyze This

I have yet to see the results of one of the Notebook Polls so one-sided, until this poll.

The question posed last month was “Which website analytics tool does your institution use?” It seems that “Google Analytics or other free analytics” was the main response (86% of respondents).  I am assuming that most responses where focusing Google Analytics and not the “other free analytics” part of the response.

Not surprisingly, the people who took the poll did not choose any of the following options that were available as a response.

• ClickTracks, WebTrends, WebSideStory HBX Analytics, Omniture’s SiteCatalyst or other non-free analytics
• None
• Don’t know
• Don’t care

And a slim 14% mentioned they use “Urchin, AWStats or Webalizer or other analytics provided by your web hoster”.

The chart below provides the full story.

We all know that keeping track of your website stats is now key data that any marketer should keep a close eye on. While there are many tools out there to track this data, they are are similar and most do a good job. Google Analytics is, by far, the fan favorite and is a very powerful tool. It takes some training to get used to, but it is well worth it.

It is good to know that everyone who took the poll pretty much agrees with this and no one mentioned that they “don’t care” or don’t have any web analytic tools.

Some key data to watch on a regular basis

• Bounce rate: how many are leaving a certain page to view a completely different website. The lower the percentage the better.
• Average Time on Site: how long users are staying on your site. The higher the better.
• Percent New Visits: how many new visitors are viewing your site. A good number to watch when running advertising designed to point lots of new people to the website. During an advertising campaign, the higher the percentage is good a sign the advertising is working.
• Pages per View: shows how many pages a viewer is looking at. The higher the number the better. It shows your audience likes your content and wants to see more. It could also mean your content is too hard to find but is still needed by the viewers.
• Traffic sources: where viewers coming from. Again, good to watch if running something like AdWords or some internet advertising. Or to know if someone has added a link to their website.
• Pages: which pages are the most viewed. In many cases, it is the home page that is the most viewed page. This is good to know so you know what content people want the most on your website.

With many of the analytics tools you can mix and match the data to get a cross section of a certain page or a certain viewer domain or of a certain day.

Some things to keep in mind when watching the data trend.

• Quick trend shifts: If you haven’t made a change recently to your website, find out why there is a quick change in the site stats. It could mean a page has crashed or a new browser update isn’t compatible with certain site functions. A sharp positive shift  in site trends could mean certain content is needed or someone has linked to your content.
• When making changes: If you plan on making changes, make incremental changes to your website and then take a break to watch the stats. If you make a small shift in the website and notice  a positive change in the data you can continue to make more of the same type of changes. If the change creates a negative reaction, revert back to the version of the site before the change took place. If you make large multifaceted changes, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t work.
• Seasonal shifts: Keep an eye on seasonal shifts in data. As we all know certain audiences on and off campus will need certain content on a seasonal basis and if you see a seasonal trend in the data you can make seasonal changes to match the needs. For example, during football season you can make your team’s scores and game times easier to find and after graduation you can make new alumni information easier to find on your site.

While it seems many use Google Analytics to track their website usage, most have their own favorite data trends to watch. I am interested to know what data people try to keep an eye on that we haven’t mentioned above.

And give us input on how the H1N1 flu is affecting your campus in the new Notebook Poll on the right panel.

Eye Tracking is Darn Fascinating

I recently spent some time digging deeper into the details of eye tracking, and quickly realized that I could spend most of a day reading about it. The idea/practice of recording eye movements and methodically analyzing the data to gain insight on everything from how a user views webpage content, to how people walk or drive, is tremendously interesting. Since this is a marketing blog, let’s move away from the walking and driving. My colleague Ashley Martin directed me toward an eye tracking study conducted by Oneupweb which focused on the study of social media sites Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and specifically around how users treated the search functions on those pages.

The point of an eye tracking study like this of course is to ultimately better understand consumer behavior. Us marketers know that’s the goal, because once we’re able to understand more of what the consumer is doing and why, then we can work to shape the behaviors we’re looking for. Eh, it sounds so evil when you put it that way but that’s how it works!

Back to the study and why I found it worthwhile. The study looked at scan paths, duration of first fixation, and length of fixation within the first thirty seconds of the search process. To start, let’s check out how a user looks at their Facebook homepage (image source: Oneupweb).

Nothing too surprising there, though I’m somewhat taken aback that there is barely a hint of green surrounding the red notification in the bottom right. I feel that when I have notifications I’m looking down there pretty quickly. Does that surprise you?

Looking at the Twitter homepage below is a little surprising to me, as I don’t feel like I view the search/trends area that strongly, but I’d never really know that for sure unless I was tested. And that’s another thing: ever since I started looking more into eye tracking, I’m paranoid when browsing websites, trying to analyze my own habits. Anyway, here’s the heat map:

Now begins the meat and potatoes of Oneupweb’s study. Looking at the gaze plot visualizations of a Facebook search result, you can see the progression of fixations the user went through. (For more information on gaze plot visualizations, click here).

The sponsored ads in the right column were viewed before users looked at the second and third results on the page. Sponsored ads truly get noticed. If you can come up with a creative and relevant Facebook ad, people are going to see it… period.

Again, you can learn more within Oneupweb’s short but sweet study on the subject. It begins to delve into a bit of areas of interest, which areas do users have a fixated gaze on for at least 1/10 of a second. Looking at the eye tracking sequence a person takes in moving from one area to the other can be extremely telling. Many times you’re likely to be surprised at the results.

In short, there’s a lot to feel good about when it comes to advertising on social networks!

Nebraska Launches Distance Ed Winner

Last week the University of Nebraska (NU) announced an aggressive plan to re-engineer its distance ed programming and greatly expand online courses to capture a larger share of the growing national and international online market and to better serve in-state students.

It’s a program to watch, already getting some attention, and probably the best-engineered “re-launch” of distance education to occur on the national scene in a long, long time.  It’s the result of a 2-year study, system-wide strategic positioning efforts, and a comprehensive series of recommendations by EMG, done in close collaboration with NU System staff.

The effort calls for nothing less than a re-engineering NU’s distance education approach:

1. Strategically positioning distance education as an “Integrated Academic Enterprise” employing the same professors who teach on the campuses
2. Marketing distance ed programs at all campuses under a single brand
3. Leveraging campus support services such as financial aid, call centers help desks
4. Strategic expansion of online programs based on emerging market needs
5. Increased brand marketing initiatives to carefully targeted audience segments
6. Creating a unified website as the entry point for all NU System online courses
7. Restructuring the financial model to spur new program development
8. Increasing tuition in order to provide/support exceptional academic quality

“We offer students what they want,” says NU President J.B. Milliken: “the same professors who teach on campus, exceptional student services, current and relevant curricula and a sense of community. Whether students are in the classroom or online, they are part of the NU community.”

By marketing all distance education programs under a single brand, Milliken says, potential students will be better served and operating costs will be reduced.

NU already offers more than 1,200 courses and more than 70 online degree and certificate programs, ranging from bachelor’s degrees to PhDs.   Aggressive new program expansion will be guided by market needs.  For example, one of the first programs out of the chute will be a bachelor’s degree completion program in business – the first time an NU business degree will be available completely online.

A new brand identity, logo, and the distance ed website, now under development, will debut this fall.   Arnold Bateman, director of NU’s distance education efforts, also plans a more aggressive regional, national and international marketing strategy in support of the effort.

All of this requires investment, and NU has wisely determined to increase and codify tuition so that NU courses are competitively priced, yet still leverage the prestige of the AAU-member NU name for students who want premier quality.

News accounts have reported recent missteps in distance ed initiatives by a few big state universities.  These costly and embarrassing snafus resulted from miscalculations of marketplace needs and lack of understanding of the marketplace itself.  Unlike these efforts, NU’s initiative has been carefully and strategically planned, and aims to put NU into a league with the big boys of distance education – University of Maryland, Penn State, UMass, and for-profits such as the University of Phoenix.

With the strong foundation they’ve begun, we’re betting they’ll succeed handily.

Google Flu Tracking

Have you ever got the feeling that everyone around you has the flu? Google may be able to answer that question for you.

Google has been tracking the number of health related searches and identified which of those are related to flu-like symptoms. They then used the flu-related searches and compared it to the information on from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that shows how many people actually have the flu; and what they found was very exciting!

The flu-related searches on Google are closely related to the surveillance data from the CDC.

So what does this mean to you? The CDC data has a lag time of two to three weeks but Google’s search trends are in real-time. This means that you can get a good sense of when the flu season begins and how it moves from region to region. You will be able to know when to be sanitizing office space more often and when to watch for when faculty, staff, and students will be sick who will be possibly calling in sick more.

Are Latino’s Missing Out on Web 2.0?

At our Brand Manager’s Summit this week, more than one of our esteemed colleagues wondered aloud whether shifts in demographics that are bringing more Latinos to their customary service areas would undercut the cresting wave of Web 2.0.

This question has been echoed by communicators and admissions leaders I’ve talked to all across the U.S. and, of course, the answer is as elusive as the question.

But… we do know a few things.

According to a March 2007 study from the Pew Internet and the American Life Project:

• 78% of Latinos who are English-dominant and 76% of bilingual Latinos use the internet, compared with 32% of Spanish-dominant Hispanic adults.
• 76% of U.S.-born Latinos go online, compared with 43% of those born outside the U.S. Some of this is related to language, but analysis shows that being born outside of the 50 states is an independent factor that is associated with a decreased likelihood of going online.
• 70% of Latinos who completed high school go online.

We also think we know another very important bit.

According to data reported by Latin-Know: The Latino Marketing Report, in February of 2008, “U.S. Hispanics have also surpassed the general market in terms of time spent online per day. Hispanics spent an average of 88.1 minutes online per day, while the online general market spent 81.7 minutes per day during Dec. 06.”

Now, this information has been reported in several marketing blogs and I have no reason to discount it… except that I haven’t seen the underlying data. The cited source is usually Terra Networks, a multinational internet company with headquarters in Spain. And, they cite proprietary data from comScore Media Metrix.

Nevertheless, taken together, it seems these stats should be encouraging to Admissions teams who are being told that they must avoid both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 because important Latinos audiences will never go to the website.

Searching for the Future of Search

Ineke’s recent post “I Freebased….No, Not That Kind!” got me thinking about what the future of search will mean for marketers. Looking for futurist insights on the topic, a quick Google search using the term “Web 3.0” retrieved roughly 2,160,000 results with a Wikipedia page: dedicated to prognostications about the future of the Web leading the pack. One of the predictions found in the Wikipedia entry comes from John Markoff of the New York Times who hypothesizes that the evolution of Web 3.0 will “emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.” The thought here is that Web 3.0 will bring about the sophistication of data analysis on the Web whereby “natural language processing”  will extract meaning from text/images and produce a set of highly specific and personalized results. In Web 3.0, you’ll engage in an interactive dialogue with your search engine to drill down to the exact information you’re looking for.

Implication? Search Engine Optimization will become a thing of the past and, as Bob Johnson suggests in an April 18^th posting, a university’s website will decrease in value as an early touchpoint.

In Web 3.0, brand awareness will become even more vital as users will quickly be able to bypass online content they are unfamiliar with. What this means for higher ed marketers is that more resources will need to be invested in getting your message out to audiences using a focused multi-platform approach.

Rural Broadband Not What You’d Expect

There is evidently a strong belief out there, because I’ve heard it many times, that rural folks don’t have broadband and therefore colleges and universities with more rural audiences should avoid the more engaging aspects that Web 2.0 provides.

It ain’t true.

Or at least it isn’t as true as people think it is. So says the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

They reported in February of this year that fully 68% of rural households used the internet in some location (only 3% lower than the nation as a whole) and 58% used it in the home. Perhaps most importantly, 38% had a broadband connection in their home.

The conclusion?… our rural audiences are getting to the Net, even if it is through their work, their school, library, or a coffee shop.

At the same time, dialup connections are in the homes of only 19% of rural households.

Most importantly, the data shows that household income is as significant a determiner of broadband use as geographic position. In fact, 51% of rural households with incomes of $50,000 per year and above (essentially middle-class by governmental standards) have broadband connections in the home and nearly 90% use the Internet at some location.

SOURCE: Prepared by Prescott Coleman from data from the NTIA report Networked Nation: Broadband in America 2007
[http://www.ntia.doc.gov/reports/2008/NetworkedNationBroadbandinAmerica2007.pdf]

And, while there is some information to suggest that the rate of broadband adoption is slowing, it seems clear that tomorrow there will be more high-speed users than today… and every day after that.