Graduates of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School are renowned for being the leaders of their field, the kind of distinction that disappears the moment you stop pushing boundaries. When the Law School came to us with the goal of redesigning their website, we understood the challenge and adopted it as our own: How do we design a website that honors their storied legacy but also attracts the next generation of legal professionals?
We created a research plan to see the challenge from all angles: How should we design the site so that it helps visitors find what they need, stands out from the competition, and simultaneously feels authentic?
If you try to put everyone first, you’ll end up helping no one. That’s why our web design strategy for the new Law School site prioritized prospective students, their most important audience.
We implemented a design system for the user interface that ensures the site is built and designed consistently now, and into the future.
Nobody knows what it’s like to attend the Law School better than active students and staff. We researched these relevant perspectives to create a foundation for our strategy, by conducting stakeholder interviews, workshops, and surveys to hear from as many diverse voices as we could.
The Law School competes for students against some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, so taking inventory of these competitors’ websites was an important step for us to create a differentiated experience. A competitive analysis is less about throwing stones at the “other guys,” and more about finding opportunities for significant differentiation.
Creating user personas is a necessary step to bring order to a large site that could otherwise become disorganized and unruly. By establishing and recording researched profiles for the site’s target audiences, we were able to prioritize content in a logical, inclusive manner. The most important audience—prospective students—could feel like the site was truly customized for their needs.
We started the site architecture phase by auditing existing content. This step allowed us to think critically about what content should stay, what should go, and what should take a different shape. The resulting sitemap became tighter and more strategic as a result.
The intermediate step between sitemap and designs is vital to the overall success of the project. Creating interactive wireframe prototypes illustrated our strategic thinking in action, enabling key stakeholders to visualize the overall structure of the site. It also gave us the space to test, experiment, and validate our UX approach before reaching the design phase, at which point structural revisions become more difficult to make.
Everything about the Law School’s experience is one-of-a-kind. Each design decision we made reinforces that unique quality of Penn Law, down to the custom iconography we created throughout the site.
We developed a writing guide to capture the voice & tone of the Law School, while providing contributing writers and editors an easy-to-use tool, ensuring the site’s copy remains on-brand. Covering web copywriting basics, SEO guidelines, and tone-of-voice pointers, this guide prevents the brand from veering off course and makes certain all site visitors, no matter what content they’re reading, leave with a cohesive impression of the School’s values.
The Law School is an inclusive environment with an inclusive, ADA compliant website. Achieving ADA Compliance can sometimes hinder both creative and technical freedom. However, because we planned the site with ADA Compliance in mind from the outset, we were able to overcome these hurdles to deliver a site that excludes no one, and excites everyone.
