Make it more Brown, but not too Brown.
Sometimes your biggest strength is your biggest weakness. When Brown University—in partnership with a prestigious NY design firm—launched their last website, it immediately spawned a slew of imitators. I’m sure you’ve seen them—those sites with layered shutters that open to reveal feature content when you roll your mouse over them. And the design had a lot going for it. It looked smart and sophisticated in a doing-our-own-thing-and-letting-the-world-follow-us way that was very, well, Brown. It was also a great platform for pushing feature content. But trying to use those shutters to navigate the rest of the site made many of Brown’s visitors want to smash things, and the A-to-Z Index quickly became the most popular page on the site because it was the only way many users could find anything.
Brown was wrestling with another strength-as-a-weakness issue with their brand. Thanks to the freedom and flexibility of their undergraduate curriculum and the boldly creative and curious kind of students it attracted, Brown has one of the most distinctive brand personalities of any of the Ivies. But to those not willing to look more closely, that personality made Brown seem a less rigorous place than its peers, and the undergraduate experience obscured the very serious research being done across the university. Even on the undergraduate level, people didn’t necessarily get how intellectual—and intellectually productive—Brown’s culture really was.
So our mission: create a new website that was as functional as it was distinctive and that presented the depth and impact—as well as the freedom—of Brown’s intellectual life, particularly as it related to research. Our first step was to streamline the information architecture and separate the navigation from the feature content. The next step was to challenge our designers to come up with ideas that were as bold and distinctive as Brown itself. It being Brown, every strategic and creative idea was talked through, tested, ripped down and built back up. The process was very heady, very challenging, and very, very collaborative. And the entire Brown community was able to weigh in on design ideas via online surveys and on-campus focus groups.
Brown’s new site went live on September 7. Since then, Brown has had more than 1.5 million page views—a 20% increase from the same period last year. Time on site has increased by 30%, and their bounce rate has dropped from 70% to 11%. Internal users—students, faculty, etc.—are largely abandoning the A to Z index in favor of the audience-specific gateways the new site provides, and a brand-new page listing degree-granting programs is already the 7th most visited page on the site.
The new site also brought about an unanticipated benefit. When student groups, academic departments, and the centers and institutes Brown sponsors saw how prominently the new site displays video and other kinds of feature content, they began creating new content and sharing work they already had, so the feature sections of the site are now being sustained by the entire Brown community.
The site has gotten tons of great feedback from students and alums and was awarded a score of 97 by EDU Checkup, but my favorite comment comes from the Brown Daily Herald. The paper awards diamonds or coal (mostly coal) to things they like or don’t (mostly don’t.) They gave, “a jealous diamond to Brown and its new website, courtesy of the firm mStoner. We tried to redo our site after a trip across the street to Spats, but it just looked mDrunker.”
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