Over the last 15 years I have worked with 17 post secondary institutions to improve the user experience on their websites. Now, I am the user.

My daughter and I spent several hours looking at over a dozen websites. We needed answers to 3 questions:

Do you have the program I want?
If yes, what are the admission requirements?
What is the application deadline?

Arguably, this is the most important task flow for prospective students.

And yet it was a painful process on almost all websites. This presentation identifies the roadblocks we ran into in areas of:

• Program search
• Navigation usability
• Content readability and accessibility

And I’ll provide recommendations for how to improve the user experience and ultimately encourage more students to apply.