Universities have dozens of services and resources offered by offices with obscure names, and students don’t know they exist or what they do. I wish I’d heard about this sooner is a common refrain from students when they learn about a service or opportunity near the end of their student career. We know Gen Z students will use Google for searching, but they can’t search for services they don’t know about.
This case study from Montreal’s Concordia University Web Team reveals the UX research, design, and implementation behind redesigning the presentation of student services on the Concordia website. The original architecture featured the services grouped by topic and listed on multiple pages, but the navigation was painful and inconsistent across sections, and many services were overlooked (ie: missing). The challenge was to develop a complete and complex a-z list of student services built with meaningful keywords, a streamlined navigation and optimized for discoverability.
Karen Spreng
User Experience Strategist, Concordia University
Karen Spreng is a UX Strategist at Concordia University with a background in psychology, research, accessibility, and digital experience design. She has spent more than 20 years working in and around higher education.
Her work focuses on reducing friction, improving clarity, and creating digital experiences that are both useful and human. She believes good digital experiences often go unnoticed because they simply work, while great ones exceed expectations in ways that feel thoughtful, intuitive, and supportive.
Outside of work, Karen enjoys exploring improv, solving far too many New York Times puzzles, vintage fashion, ukulele, and trying to convince herself she really does have room for one more niche perfume.
Sarah Sookman
Digital Content Advisor, Concordia University
Sarah Sookman is a Digital Content Advisor at Concordia University with more than 25 years of experience in marketing and technical communications, digital content strategy,
and user training. At Concordia since 2013, Sarah has worked on dozens of web projects, from restructuring a single page, to full-scale website overhauls of more than 500 pages. She established the training program for Concordia’s content management
system and trained over 400 staff between 2013 and 2022).
Her focus is on improving the usability and accessibility of digital content across the university’s web ecosystem. She particularly enjoys the implementation of a project because the planning is an abstract mental exercise to fit pieces of a puzzle together
before they really exist.
Outside of work, she is always reading a book, loves travel and craft cocktails, and wishes she could do karaoke more often. She is learning Romanian and leads a Truth and Reconciliation committee at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom in Montreal.