Optimizing The Digital Experience
A human-centered approach at the intersection of human behavior and computer interactions.
Augusta University | The Graduate School
Design Research | Human-Centered Web Optimization
Year: 2018 - 2019
This is a body of work rather than a project: the continuous evolution of the graduate web experience in response to what users actually needed, while communicating the graduate student experience outward to prospective students. Two smaller case studies sit inside it — Homepage Optimization and Landing Page Optimization — each a specific instance of the same practice: observe how people actually behave, form a hypothesis, test it, and let the evidence decide.
BACKGROUND
DILEMMA Internal IA testing had been done with staff, but redesign decisions were otherwise being made without a clear understanding of how prospective and current graduate students actually experienced the site — what built or eroded their confidence while researching programs and applying.
OBJECTIVE Ground the redesign in direct, first-hand understanding of student behavior — using in-depth interviews and usability testing with actual students, not staff proxies, so decisions reflected real behavior rather than institutional assumptions.
MY ROLE Information Architect | Content Strategist | Web & Behavioral Analyst | Project/Product Manager
CAPABILITIES LEVERAGED In-Depth Interviews (IDI), Usability Testing, Human-Centered Design Research
PROCESS
Usability sessions were run in rounds of six to seven participants each, conducted directly with prospective and current students rather than staff proxies, to understand how they actually navigated the graduate enrollment site, where they got stuck, and what built or undermined their confidence in the process. Running in iterative rounds rather than a single large study meant findings could feed development while pages were still being built, rather than arriving as a verdict after the fact.
The research operated alongside a second source of ground truth: program directors shaping content against the realities of their own programs. Students established how information needed to be found and understood; program directors established that what was found was accurate. Neither alone would have been sufficient — student research without program expertise produces a usable site describing programs incorrectly, and program expertise without student research produces accurate content organized the way the institution thinks rather than the way an applicant looks.
TENSIONS NAVIGATED The persistent tension across all Augusta University work was operating inside a large bureaucratic government institution while trying to add value that the structure wasn't built to accommodate. Progress came less from authority than from building strategic partnerships across the institution, amplifying the voices of subject matter experts rather than speaking over them, showcasing the graduate experience honestly, and holding to a human-centered approach to the digital experience even where the institutional default was to organize information around the org chart.
RESULTS
Iterative usability rounds of six to seven participants each, feeding findings into page development while it was underway rather than after
Content shaped jointly by student research and program director expertise — findability grounded in observed behavior, accuracy grounded in subject matter authority
A standing optimization practice rather than a one-time study: analytics and behavior mapping used continuously to surface where the experience was failing, with each finding treated as a testable hypothesis
Directly informed the information architecture, content, and design decisions behind the redesign — the same redesign that drove the 71% increase in graduate enrollment documented in the System Design case study
Collection
Homepage Optimization
Homepage Optimization
Engagement data revealed a quiet failure: visitors were leaving the homepage without ever seeing most of it. Scroll and behavior mapping showed content below the fold going undiscovered — prompting a redesign built around what people actually did on the page rather than what the page was meant to contain.
Landing Page Optimization
Landing Page Optimization
Rather than redesign program pages on instinct, we tested. A/B experiments in Google Optimize established which landing page structure actually performed, and the winning variant became the standard template rolled out across every program page — one experiment improving 49 programs.