The web has become the dominant mode of communication with prospective students. A college or university’s website has long since replaced its viewbook as the critical communication link. Yet web sites are far more complex and serve many more purposes and audiences than viewebooks did. So a great deal of thought must be put into their structure, voice, visual design, and functionality.

But admissions and marketing officers don’t have to make those decisions in the dark or based on what their competitors are doing. They can conduct research with the site’s intended users – especially prospective students, but also current students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the wider community – to understand what’s wanted.

For this mid-sized public university, we collaborated with the respected higher ed communications firm mStoner. They had developed a number of creative options for the school’s web site. Our job was to solicit thoughtful feedback from the site’s primary target audience: high school seniors considering applying to this college and others.

Interestingly, our main client at the university clearly preferred one of the four concepts over the others, so we were curious to see whether our 17 year-old survey respondents would agree.

We decided to test four homepage concepts using an online survey. We structured the survey around discrete choice modeling, which allowed us to isolate respondents’ preferences for certain characteristics (color, imagery, features, navigation structure, etc.)

We also developed special randomization programming to ensure that the results were not influenced by the order in which the options were shown (a well-documented problem in certain kinds of survey research, but one that is often overlooked in marketing research).

Our report examined not only what students were seeking in the website, but why. This emphasis on the audience’s needs and thought process allowed us to identify key principles for the university to focus on as it moved forward with the website design and other communication initiatives.

So, did the client’s own favorite design win? No. But our findings and recommendations were so compelling that he happily adopted the preferred concept and encouraged mStoner to continue refining it according to the needs and desires the audience had articulated.