Trust that Feeling: Congruence as a Driver of the Website Redesign Process

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
-Mahatma Gandhi

In other words, be congruent. Don’t tell your direct reports to write more descriptive subject lines with a message titled “Email Issue.” Don’t pressure your partner to get more exercise while you stay firmly on the couch. Congruence suggests an easy symmetry, where everything folds together and effortlessly aligns. When we feel congruent, we feel hopeful, authentic, and on the right track.

We know our campuses are special, organic communities filled with students, faculty, and staff who recognize the community’s unique value. Each time a new member joins, it shows that someone else appreciates the organization we devote ourselves to sustaining. In higher education, our efforts to build and maintain a web presence should amount to an institution-wide journey toward congruence.

Organizational consultant Andrea Mathews, L.P.C. puts it nicely:

“When we are authentic, we are congruent. The mind, heart, body, soul are all working together and going in the same direction. And the recipient of any communication from this authentic person is going to feel that congruence. She might not know what to call it, but she knows it and she probably likes it. It feels to both the sender and receiver a little like coming home.”

Congruence is so powerful that it should be reason enough for a school to pursue a website redesign. Instead, when thinking about whether or not to start the process, higher education professionals often do a lot of justification. This is busywork of the highest order; you can spend months benchmarking, quantifying successes and failures, citing non-compliance with standards, and on and on. All of this is important work that can help make the case. But I would argue that, too often, the sense of place your site conveys to prospective students, faculty, and staff is wildly different from your actual community’s sense of place.

This incongruence needs to be resolved, not just recognized, during your redesign process. If your transfer office had a dead-end hallway, how long would you leave up a sign with an arrow that said, “Speak with a counselor, this way?” What about the staff member who hands out three-year-old versions of your recommendation form? If your site’s navigation leads to broken links and outdated PDFs, it has the same effect: poor service and missed opportunities at every turn. Online, these mistakes can linger for months or years.

This is incongruence: the digital expression of your institution’s experience doesn’t match the actual version. Students and parents can sense it. If your web site’s design, navigation or content issues cloud the actual student experience, how can those students be expected to accurately determine whether or not they fit with your institution? Students leave school for many complex reasons, but some of those reasons undoubtedly relate to a sense of incongruence.

So, yes, benchmark and quantify away. But the largest lost opportunity in an aged or neglected web presence may feel more like incongruence. Trust that feeling.