RPI.EDU
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is the oldest engineering school in America, and as they celebrate their bicentennial, I worked with them to refresh their official homepage where students, staff, and alums can quickly navigate to pre-existing pages.
Understanding the original site
At the start of the process, I took a look at what parts of their original homepage were in need of change.
As a school known for their famous alums, such as the inventor of the ferris wheel, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., or the "father of modern TV," Dr. Allen B. Dumont, I wanted to highlight the characteristics of such a prolific engineering school.
What the original homepage lacked was a sense of clean, sleek, efficient design.
The nav bar is a critical starting point for a user's experience
To begin, I took a look at the original header nav. There were issues with the main logo being low res, and what seemed, 3 different sets of menus that misaligned.
The number of line breaks and pages was keeping users from being able to quickly visually explore the nav. There wasn't enough typographic hierarchy to seamlessly offer information to other pages.
A gallery offers user's a variety of insights into the RPI experience
When taking a look at the original "gallery", what we really missed was a way for the school to exhibit more events, more news, and listings that could engage users. The original gallery was static, and could only feature one listing at a time. There was also a blue CTA that did not fit in their brand guidelines that stuck out against their traditional red.
Insights from our prior project, Rensselaer Firsts
Having produced a prior website for the school, we learned a lot about how it performed against the original RPI homepage. Though the purpose of the RPI Firsts site was different from what a school's homepage has to offer, we updated a few of the systems from their pre-existing brand guidelines to make it fresh and new.
Website engagement rates
rensselaerfirsts.com
56.26%
rpi.edu
46.08%
The overall site engagement rate for rensselaerfirsts.com is roughly 10 points higher than rpi.edu at 56.26%.
Site engagement for rpi.edu averages 46.08%.
Homepage avg. engagement rates
rensselaerfirsts.com
42 seconds
rpi.edu
21 seconds
The homepage for rensselaerfirsts.com has an average engagement time of 42 seconds.
However, the homepage for rpi.edu averages half the engagement time of rensselaerfirsts.com at 21 seconds.
Takeaways from the analytics
We were able to show the prospective success of rpi.edu if we applied the same philosophy we created rensselaerfirsts.com.
Accessibility takes priority
One of the first things I wanted to focus on was bringing accessible design to the forefront. Taking a look at the footer, I immediately noticed that the text over image was going to bring issues. And not just that, having 2 seemingly "different" sections was confusing.
Much like the nav, the footer was meant to be a conclusion to the site where users met gateways to pages they were curious after digesting the entire homepage.
