Increasing Enrollment for Utah Valley University’s Culinary Arts Institute
A Case Study in Client-Focused Web Design
I had an opportunity to work in a group with Utah Valley University’s Culinary Arts Institute on redesigning their website. We met with representatives from the department to interview them on their vision and needs for the site, as well as their current problems to see if we could align our skills with their vision.
The Interview
During our initial interview with our clients, my group quickly learned that they were unhappy with the current website because critical information for potential students was hard to access. They also felt the overall design didn’t accurately showcase the skills of the staff and students. We asked our clients who they felt the website would be used for the most and they had a few different types of users: the main users of the site would be future students, current students, and people wanting to make a reservation or book catering at one of their restaurants.
Vision
Creating a website designed to increase enrollment and retention in the Culinary Arts program at UVU with results from user research.
Our group came up with this vision after meeting with the clients. We felt that one of departments biggest problems was enrollment and retention and we wanted the website to make it easier to apply to the program.
Personas
Our group created three personas fitting the three types of users of the site and what their hypothetical needs and goals were and how the website could assist them.
Design Principles
We wanted to utilize a few design principles into our design to create a more intuitive organization to the site and to lead users to pages that give them the information they’re looking for. We conducted a heuristic review of the current site and noticed that many pages had too much going on and could be effecting users’ ability to find what they’re looking for and make decisions. By implementing Hick’s Law, we wanted to simplify the pages to help prospective students find degree information quicker. We noticed that information on the home page was stacked in an arbitrary order, so we wanted to restructure the content in a hierarchical order based on what is most important for a particular page to help users find what they want. The Pareto Principle states that eighty percent of the attention is spent on twenty percent of a website, so if the goal is to recruit more students, we wanted to make sure that that portion of the website is aimed towards them and has everything that they need.
Surveys and Interviews
Our next step in the design process was to conduct surveys to get as much user information as we could to guide our designs. We sent out over 100 surveys to UVU students, high school kids, college graduates, and more. Our survey results indicated that many people underestimated the cost of the program, but almost no one knew very much about it.
Our group then conducted about 10 interviews with students and potential students asking about how they decided on their major or what they wanted to major in. We asked questions about culinary arts and if they’d ever considered a career in it. One person I interviewed said they started out college wanted to go into culinary arts, but thought that the program was too expensive and wasn’t sure what they’d do as a career after graduation. I asked if they’d looked into scholarships and they weren’t aware there were special scholarships for the culinary program.
Design Iterations
Our group split up the website design by specific pages, and I designed the Services page, which contained all the information about the restaurants and catering. In our initial interview with the clients, they mentioned how important the Restaurant Forte was because it was how the culinary students could implement their skills in a real-world situation.
In my first sketches, I wanted to use a lot of images on the page to draw the user in and make them want to book a reservation. The original website had broken pdf links and an outdated menu, and it didn’t have a way to make a reservation. I added an additional page about the Restaurant Forte that showcased more pictures and a reservation form for a user to submit.
Creating a wireframe was my next iteration. I make the donation button a little smaller because I wanted to focus to be on the three main elements: catering, Restaurant Forte, and Cafe At Canyon Park (another Culinary Arts restaurant). We ended up adding the donation button to another page on the site as well as this one because we felt it was important on both pages, but not as important on this page.
In my final iteration of the Services page, I used photographs from the Culinary Arts department to showcase the students’ skills. We followed UVU’s style guide in regards to font, color, buttons, footers, and icons. Below you can see what the Services page looks like now, and my redesign.
The old design doesn’t utilize any images from the Culinary Arts Institute, nor does it have an easy way to make a reservation. Our redesign addresses both of those concerns.
Eye Tracking Test
After my group created a working prototype of the site, we conducted eye-tracking tests. We asked each test subject to complete specific tasks and discovered that tuition costs were very difficult to find. All of the subjects struggled with navigating through the site, but liked all of the photographs used and how it felt very similar to UVU’s website.
We used to results of the eye-tracking test to change where we put the tuition costs.
Conclusion
In our final presentation to the clients, we showed them our working prototype of the new design and explained the results of our surveys, interviews, and eye-tracking tests. We also discussed the design principles that guided our decisions as well as our vision to help recruit more students to the Culinary Arts Program. Our clients were impressed with the landing page, the photographs, and the navigation throughout the website.
Erin Hancock is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to DGM 2240 Course and representative of the skills learned.
