Case Study : NUS Business School Website Information Architecture Redesign

Disclaimer: The below article is a documentation of a course project as part of the User Experience Design Immersive UXDI course at General Assembly, Singapore. The project brief was provided to simulate a real-life scenario. The writer and content of this article is not affiliated with the featured organisation in any way.
1. Project Objective
For our second project as part of the UX immersive course at General Assembly, I worked with my partner, Sant to redesign the Information Architecture (IA) and key pages layout of the NUS Business School website to meet the goals of the 3 personas provided and the goals of the school as well as to align with the existing brand values of the school. The project took place over the course of 2 weeks.
This project involved working as a team to deploy a variety of UX research methods including heuristic evaluation, card sorting and tree test to develop the Information Architecture. From this research, a wireframes and a lo-fidelity prototype was created which was further refined with a usability test to create a mid-fidelity prototype.
2. Background of NUS Business School
NUS Business School is the business school of the National University of Singapore (NUS). The School is consistently rated as one of the top business schools in the Asia Pacific region and one of the leading business schools worldwide. It offers a broad portfolio of academic programmes, including BBA, MBA, Executive MBA, MSc and PhD programmes. It also offers a wide range of customised and open enrolment programmes in its Executive Education courses.

3. Personas
For this project, we were provided with personas with predefined needs and pains points to enable us to come up with a redesign of the website that will address these needs.
The personas are:
i) Mark, 17 years old, an excellent student who’s just about to start on his college application process.
ii) Jessica,21 years old, a returning law major. She can finally start to explore classes that are more interesting but will need to fulfil her major’s specific requirements.
iii) John, 38 years old, a regional sales manager. John is considering a return to school for courses that will advance his professional development. John is a working father so scheduling is of the utmost importance to his decision making. As such, a short-term executive education programme on specific topics will be more suited to his needs. John will also be the key persona we will be focusing the prototype on.

4. Research
We first drafted our research plan to begin with heuristic analysis to give us an overview of the website. This was followed by users’ interviews, content audit and competitive analysis which provided the basis for the card sort to regroup the website information. The results from the card sort was then verified with a Tree Test. This provided the basis for the final Information Architecture.

A) Heuristic Analysis
We began the research process with an assessment of the website through heuristic evaluation using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. This assessment is based on the needs of the 3 given personas. Some of the key findings are as below:

1. Navigation bar (Recognition rather than recall): The difference in navigation bars from main site to microsite made it difficult for users to recall. Users
2. Search Tool (Recognition rather than recall): The difference in navigation bars from main site to microsite made it difficult for users to recall position
3. Second navigation bar (Consistency and Standards): This was meant as shortcuts but did not follow the same consistency in naming convention with top navigation bar and served to be more confusing instead.
4. Social media icons everywhere (Aesthetic and minimalist design): Social media icons were located at locations not relevant for sharing
5. Accelerators (Flexibility and Efficiency of Use): For example, there were too many shortcuts for ‘events’ within the same page causing confusions for the users.
B) User Interviews
We then conducted user interviews with users (similar to provided personas) to gain more contextual understanding towards their main purpose for visiting the website and what their key concerns were. We also better understood the behaviour and attitudes of the users toward the website through usability tests of the website.

C) Content Audit, User Flow and Competitive Analysis
We also did an in-depth content audit of the existing website and the user flows of each persona and drew an IA for the current website. This step gave us a more complete picture of the information we had to reorganise. A competitive analysis was also completed on NUS Business School key competitors including SMU, NTU and SIM to understand the usability of these websites as compared to the NUS Business School website.
At this stage, based on the research information we had, we formulated both the problem statement and solution statement to move forward .


D) Affinity Mapping
The first stages of research above helped to provide the insight to make the key decisions for the categories that we wanted to explore for the new main navigation bar on the homepage. From the previous stages of research, we realised that a lot of essential information was hidden inside the various categories while other information of less priority was prominently featured.
Using the users’ needs and priorities as a guide, we used affinity mapping to synthesise the research materials to distil the below categories for the main navigation header.


E) Card Sort
From the affinity mapping, we proceeded with a card sorting exercise. Card sorting is used at this stage to further evaluate the information architecture of the website site. Participants will organize topics into categories according to their understanding during a card sorting session. For this session, we conducted a closed card sort using the categories we had come up with in our earlier research for the new navigation bar as we wanted to know how they will sort the content items.
We tested a total of 16 users representing similar demographics as our 3 personas focusing on the new categories we have created. This was to ensure that users will not be distracted by the other categories that will remain relatively the same. From the card test, we verified that the new categories to be suitable as results were within our target range.

F) Tree Testing
With the building blocks in place, we proceeded next to test our intended structure with our users using the tree testing method. A tree testing requires users to find location with the ‘tree’ to complete specific tasks, this is intended to evaluate a hierarchical category structure.
2 rounds of tree testings were implemented, with a first round for the overall NUS Business School page and the 2nd round focusing on the user flow for our focus user; John who is interested in executive education. The tree testing showed that at least 75% of each of the 4 tasks were completed by 8 users.
Here are 2 of the tasks completed, the tasks were designed to reflect John’s needs and users for testing were selected to resemble John’s persona:


With results of the tree testing, we then proceeded with our final IA.
You can view the final IA here.
The final IA was used as a basis for wireframing and the creation of a lo-fi prototype. Sketching first on paper was very helpful process to rapid prototype and generate ideas for different layouts quickly. We also revisited the same sketched to make iterations after our usability test.
You can view the lo-fi prototype here.

G) Usability Test
5 users with demographics similar to John’s persona tested the system to complete 8 tasks using the prototype. All were successful in completing tasks with key tasks taking less than a minute and rated the prototype an average of 78% for usability based on a System Usability Scale Test(SUS) which was within our targeted results. The feedback showed us that our user flows created were aligned with their needs and at the same time also provided us with further feedback to improve our user interface. Some of the comments include size of fonts as well as the busy interface on the main homepage. These were taken into consideration and tweaked accordingly.


The prototype addressed the earlier highlighted key concerns of John:
i) Information on continuing education:
- From the NUS Business School homepage, user is now able to access the programme list page directly in the Executive Education website to choose programme by topic or date
- From the Executive Education site, he can easily view the list of programmes from the dropdown box.
With the above changes, the user path was shorten allowing for a quick more efficient way to access the required information
ii) Programme Page
- This was enhanced with a side navigation panel to address the user needs to access the information quickly as they can go straight to the required section. This was previously hidden and was not noticeable.
- Infographics on the class profile provide users with a quick overview of the required information for e.g age of the programme attendees
iii) Faculty Page
- The faculty page was also brought to the Executive Education microsite and redesigned to allow users to access faculty by programme. This information was previously not available.
The prototype and the final presentation can be viewed here.


Final Thoughts and Learnings
This project was a very enjoyable experience as I had the opportunity to collaborate with Sant who was from a very different background and who was very helpful in guiding me. Throughout the project, whenever we had differing views, it was heartening to know that we could both look to our users to be the decisive factor in guiding our final decisions.
Of the research methods used, affinity mapping played a key role in helping us to not only define the insights but instill the discipline of collaborating as a team. As a team, we found ourselves using affinity mapping to focus on key ideas and come to a consensus on our next steps. This was especially helpful for deciding the categories prior to implementing the card sort and determining the changes to be made to our prototype after the usability test.
For the next steps , we will like to increase the level of interactivity such as more reaction when a user interacts with a button. Other features could also include a course comparison tool which will be helpful for busy executives to shortlist the courses that most suit their needs.
Thanks for reading! If you want to collaborate or just want to say hello, reach me at yvettesimux@gmail.com .
