AYEC: Design Solutions

While the primary marketing materials for AYEC are white with blue text and yellow highlight, we decided to reverse the colors in the header for more color and better establishment of branding through the use of blue text for emphasis throughout the site, namely some headers, links, and buttons.

To get the home page to pop visually with Naomi's chosen new message of "High Impact College Advising", I used a current, if trendy, banner treatment.  The beauty of the banner image is that it says "college" without looking like any college in particular.

Navigation has been moved from the left to the top and organized differently than the original, addressing the Parent persona's desires to determine AYEC's and Naomi's credentials first, for the Validate business goal.  Navigation items go from "Who we are" to "What we do" to "What you'll get".  The "Student Portal" item under "Colleges" is for the Student persona and goes to an external site while the rest of the pages are for the Parent persona, though the Student may also use the "Resources".

The navigation also reflects the content farther down the page, which was a marketing treatment worked out between me and Naomi to stress Naomi's personal credentials, her services, and how well she helps students get accepted to the colleges they want.

This marketing treatment was worded to deliberately address the Differentiate goal: a connection between Naomi and clients that you would not find elsewhere.  In figure 3, notice the My/Our/Your progression, having Naomi on one side ("my"), the client on the other side ("your") and the relationship/partnership ("our") centered.

Whereas the previous site design required the user to click to get to any pertinent information whatsoever, the new design gives partial data from five other pages, providing far more information and only needing scrolling.  The information entices the user to click for further details while providing more breadth about AYEC without leaving the page.  This progressive disclosure of information allows the Validate goal to be reached more quickly and encourages further reading, increasing the success toward the Differentiate goal.

Visually, the use of images and the 3-column layout used in Figure 3 is more interesting and emotionally impactful than the single-column text-only presentation from the original site.  I considered Naomi's recommendation of using non-photograph images for a cleaner look, but we agreed that photographs create a more emotional and personal connection.

The progressive disclosure continues for the rest of the page (see Figures 4), creating quick impressions and promising more.  For the testimonials, I suggested the use of college logos to increase visual interest and to drive the user towards the testimonial comments by visually representing the results, as mentioned earlier on the page, without having to read through all the text. 

The user can very quickly see these are testimonials for students who got accepted to Georgia Tech and Duke.  If they recognize the crest of the University of Pennsylvania, that also draws interest.  If they don't, they might be interested in finding out what crest that is and therefore still read the testimonial.

In general, more information on the page also addresses mobile use, as touch-device users are used to the ease of scrolling on their devices.

The original design of this page was just a single two-column bullet list.  Lots of bullets.

The new design turns this data into two pages.  The Overview page presents a subset of schools, using logos again for visual interest, with the intention of showing different kinds of schools included in AYEC's results.  Given all the logos, no banner was needed.  This page then provides a link to the full list of schools where clients were recently accepted.

My college advising prospects and other centers of influence find the new site informative and inspiring.

-- Naomi Steinberg, Founder, Apply Yourself Educational Consulting, Boca Raton, FL