UCSF School of Nursing
Client Overview
UCSF School of Nursing is recognized as one of the premier graduate nursing schools in the United States. Its faculty members serve in advisory and leadership capacities in policy, health care delivery, and clinical and translational research, and the school fosters excellence, diversity and innovation in its work.
Services Provided
The Problem
The home page was problematic and not reflective of the excellent work of the school: because users were overwhelmed with options in the main menu, the site was hard to navigate, with the main issue being that it was difficult to entice users to go to Apply for programs. Additionally, their outdated design was no longer appealing to prospective students. It was time for a more modern visual appeal, and to also get more cohesive with the UCSF brand standards being applied across the larger university.
The Solution
In order to do the most effective and focused fix on the home page, Kanopi analyzed their traffic and spoke with UCSF Nursing about their most important pathways. Additionally, we interviewed them on their design preferences, mandatory needs and desired visual mood.
In order to expose the most important pathways, we redesigned their header, as well as the main navigation, resulting in the most critical pathway — “Apply Now” — being much more prominent in the header. Kanopi also updated their visual design language to elevate their brand presence, meeting their desires to brighten up the experience, to make important pathways obvious, and to create a more approachable tone overall.
Key Features
Updated Navigation
Highlighting the Apply process was paramount for not only their prospective students, but to solidify the institutions Accreditation standards. The new navigation includes social media, a clear area for search and an Apply Now button which gives visitors an easy route to the next step of applying.
Mission
Until the redesign, there was no clear statement about what the UCSF School of Nursing stood for on their homepage. We elevated the message and included quick links to help users navigate important areas of the website.
Success Story
There are so many powerful success stories for students at the UCSF School of Nursing, a critical goal was to highlight a few on the homepage. With Kanopi’s “small bites for big wins” mantra, we are now designing a section on the site to feature more success stories to add to the homepage’s message.
Design Process
Chunky Wires
Since we were using existing brand components from UCSF, we used the wireframing stage as more of an alignment on content hierarchy.
Visual Design
Once aligned on the order of content blocks, we flushed out the design with pre-existing design guidelines, taking liberties where appropriate. The new look refreshed the tone and feel of the site, but more importantly increased the pathway to Applications, their key goal.
The Result
The internal stakeholder team is delighted with the changes. Prior to the home page redesign, the data on views to the “Apply” page was 8,609, and three months after the update it had risen to 9,411 — a 9.3% increase in the first three months after launch.
