Case study Princeton University

Princeton University is a research university located in Princeton, New Jersey founded in 1746, It provides undergraduate and graduate education in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. Ranked either first or second national universities from 2001 to 2018.

This time I’m evaluating its website by asking others to do several tasks using the website and giving their first impression of the site, as well a the ease of use when navigating.

The main problems I found were; the website is overwhelming whit so many information, despite the great organization of its landing page, when users tried to complete their tasks all spent at least 5–8 minutes for each task and some even gave up.

The way I would fix this problem is to segment users by their profile, thinking that when a user is an alumni, he won’t be interested in admission & aid or the other way around when a user is interested in admissions, he won’t need information research.

By eliminating options your user won’t use, navigation becomes less overwhelming and you can focus your content for your type of user instead of having all information for everyone. You could still have a way to change between type of users from anywhere since there will be a general menu with more options for every user.

This process made me realize that you can learn a lot of a product (app, website or any other type of product) by observing a user while interacting with it. Sometimes we take things for granted instead of observing and we miss a lot of pain points in our products.

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