Highly Considered Purchases & User Base Expectations
In Search Patterns: Design for Discovery (2010), Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender ask us to “look beyond our own borders” to discover ways to improve the products and services we deliver. The authors encourage us to look to the periphery and then return focus to the tasks at hand. To that end, I believe that higher education sites could benefit from looking at the experiences and tools provided on the sites for other highly considered purchases, namely cars and real estate.
Your Web site does not exist in a vacuum, nor do your constituents’ online experiences. Their experiences on other sites, whether they are banking, news, entertainment, or social networking sites, continue to raise the bar for what visitors expect from your site. Those tools and features from other sites collectively increase the expectations of your visitors.
Selecting, applying, and paying for the right college is part of a highly considered purchase process for students and parents. Therefore it is important to provide visitors with the tools to help them make an informed decision. Ideally, those tools should be intuitive and easy to use. Pragmatically, people are most interested in costs, both in terms of time and money. How easy or hard is it for a visitor to understand the costs of attending your institution? Look at the decision-making tools available on real estate sites (including mortgage providers) and auto manufactures. Costs are not buried on these sites and parametric-style search features help find the right car or home for you, the costs, and the financing options.
While the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 will remedy some of the financial issues by November 2011, it will most likely create a commodity-style decision tool. By taking a complex, daunting, and somewhat overwhelming decision-making process, and providing tools to clarify and cut through the noise, institutions can help build trust with the potential students and provide fewer reasons for them to abandon their visit or lose interest in your institution entirely.
Not only are your Web visitors judging your institution relative to competitor institutions, but they are judging their online experience relative to other interactions and experiences they have online. What things are you doing on your site to positively influence the user experience?
Photo by Jchetan
