🕒 2025 | Dartmouth College, Geisel School of Medicine
🎯 Executive Summary:
Led UX and content improvements across Geisel’s admissions web experience to make critical information easier for prospective students to find, understand, and act on. Evaluated information architecture, content hierarchy, navigation pathways, and page-level interaction patterns to identify opportunities to reduce friction and improve usability. Restructured admissions content around user intent while balancing institutional requirements, accessibility standards, search visibility, and responsive design.
🛑 The Challenge:
Geisel’s admissions website contained extensive information prospective students needed throughout the application process, but important resources such as application requirements, deadlines, policies, and frequently asked questions were not always presented in ways that supported quick discovery and comprehension.
The FAQ experience in particular presented an opportunity to rethink how task-oriented admissions information was structured. Prospective students arriving with specific questions needed to locate answers quickly without navigating dense content or understanding Geisel’s internal organizational structure.
⚙️ The Strategy:
- Designed Around User Intent: Approached admissions content from the perspective of prospective students and the questions they were trying to answer, rather than simply reflecting the institution’s internal content structure.
- Improved Information Architecture & Findability: Reorganized and surfaced high-value admissions information to create clearer pathways to application requirements, deadlines, policies, and related resources.
- Redesigned the FAQ Experience: Restructured frequently asked questions into a more scannable and cohesive experience, using clear content hierarchy and interaction patterns to help users quickly locate relevant information.
- Strengthened Content Hierarchy: Applied UX writing and content-design principles to improve headings, labels, excerpts, and page structure so users could more easily understand and navigate complex admissions information.
- Embedded Accessibility: Applied WCAG 2.2 principles throughout the experience, considering semantic structure, keyboard interaction, content hierarchy, readability, and accessible interaction patterns as part of the design rather than as a post-launch remediation step.
- Supported Search Discoverability: Structured content and excerpts to improve how admissions information could be understood and surfaced through organic search while maintaining a user-centered content experience.
- Optimized Responsive Experiences: Reviewed critical admissions pathways across desktop, smartphone, and tablet experiences to ensure content remained usable, readable, and accessible across devices.
⭐️ The Impact:
✅ Transformed the FAQ into a more scannable, cohesive, and user-centered resource for prospective students.
✅ Improved the visibility and organization of critical admissions information, helping users navigate complex application requirements more efficiently.
✅ Integrated WCAG 2.2 accessibility principles directly into content structure and interaction patterns.
✅ Strengthened content structure and excerpts to support organic search visibility and information discovery.
✅ Established reusable UX and content patterns that could support continued improvement across the broader admissions experience.
🛠 Tools & Skills Used:
WordPress | Information Architecture | UX Design | UX Writing | Content Strategy | Accessibility (WCAG 2.2) | SEO | Responsive Design | HTML/CSS | PHP Customization