DILEMMA

Program landing pages across 49 graduate programs shared no evidence-based standard. Each could be improved individually, but that would mean 49 separate design judgments made on instinct, with no way to know which performed better.

OBJECTIVES

OBJECTIVE Establish, through experiment rather than opinion, which landing page structure actually worked for prospective students — then apply the answer at scale.

MY ROLE Web & Behavioral Analyst | UX Designer | Experiment Design

CAPABILITIES LEVERAGED A/B Testing (Google Optimize), Behavioral Heatmap Tracking, Usability Testing, Web Analytics, UX Design, Content Strategy

PROCESS

Rather than treating each program page as a separate design problem, competing landing page variants were tested against each other in Google Optimize. Evidence came from two directions at once: behavioral heatmap tracking showed where attention actually landed on the page, while successive rounds of usability testing measured something heatmaps can't — whether people could recall the information afterward. Scannability was the design hypothesis; recall was the test of whether it worked. The winning variant was then codified as the standard template and rolled out across program pages, converting a single controlled experiment into an improvement applied 49 times over.

RESULTS

• Pages that were measurably easier to scan, producing increased user recall of information across successive rounds of usability testing — the outcome that matters for a prospective student comparing programs

• Attention patterns confirmed independently through behavioral heatmap tracking

• The winning variant codified as a standard template and rolled out across all program pages — one experiment, 49 programs improved