Project: Project Success College Conversations Podcast Webpage, December 2020

My role: As Communications Manager, I was in charge of planning, creating and executing changes to this page based on consultation with our College and Career Tours Program Manager.

Audience: Minneapolis Public Schools students and their families seeking post-secondary guidance from Project Success staff and expert partners.

Goal: Create a user-friendly version 2 page to house all College Conversations podcast episodes, in addition to interior pages with customized curriculum for each episode.

Challenges:

• The Project Success website was developed by an outside development partner, Clockwork, and has a three column layout by default. We did not have a development budget available to customize this section of the website, so we needed to work within our CMS and existing webpage template to create something that looked fresh and new.
• Our professional staff had developed a robust set of curricular tools for students to use during and after listening to each episode. These often included links, file attachments and video clips, and they all needed to find a home on the web in a way that was visually appealing and easy to navigate.

Strategy: 

• I knew that, as our list of episodes continued to grow, we would need to devise a design that allowed for easier perusal on both desktop and mobile, particularly for our students who we hoped would listen to episodes "on the go" on their phones. We removed episode descriptors from the main page for easier navigation and a shorter episode list (by the end of 2021, College Conversations had an archive of 16 episodes).
• Users needed to be able to see a menu of options for listening, since many episodes were not linear but instead specifically tailored to target audiences, ex. "First Generation Scholars" or "Being a College Athlete." Using icons allowed for a quick scan of the page and also assisted non-English speakers in identifying episode topics.
• Our button copy wasn't accurately reflecting the actions we wanted users to take while on the page, to listen and subscribe. So, we changed our button copy to accurately reflect these calls to action.

Results: 

• Seventeen percent of all traffic to our website in FY21 (July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021) was to our College and Career Tours program page. Our College Conversations podcast webpage, brand new as of March 2021, has received more than 500 views and makes up more than 1 percent of all traffic to our website.

BEFORE

Podcast Homepage

AFTER

Podcast Homepage

Podcast Episode Page