The Harvard Extension School, or HES, offers its students degrees or certificates from Harvard, but from an academic program that can be completed remotely and without embarking on the full admission process. I worked on a team to redesign the Harvard Extension School’s website, making it as flexible as their programs of study.
From the home page (or any page a visitor enters the site from first), it's clear from the design and content choices that the Extension School is part of the Harvard brand and held to the high quality standards as the rest of schools under the Harvard umbrella.
Because scheduling time to learn and study as an adult is difficult, we wanted to make finding a suitable program easy with the Sample Course Paths we designed. For instance, if someone was interested in a graduate degree in Finance, the tool outlines exactly which courses they take (and when) during their time at HES.
We worked hard to create an easily navigable course listing. We created a system that can be filtered by a variety of facets based on taxonomies, and we worked to make the taxonomies as customer-friendly as possible.
Nothing speaks better for a school than reading testimonials from real people who went through a program. Appropriately tagged Student Success Stories are peppered into the experience to underscore the value of an education at Harvard Extension School. Each page of the site provides context through the lens of a human experience, while also allowing a prospective student to easily enroll in courses.
These success stories can also be viewed (and filtered) all in one place on their blog.
We took HES' wealth of content and refined it. We tested our content with prospective students, who found our product friendlier and much easier to use than before. I received excellent feedback from the client team on how much of an improvement the new navigation was, including one team member who wrote months later to commend us on how much easier the redesign had made his life.
My role on project: Designer (stakeholder interviews, site mapping, template mapping, wireframes, design, annotations, quality assurance, style guide writing and functionality documentation)