Qualitative and quantitative research
Imperial College London
“your mum helped us see the most valuable changes we could make for the biggest impact. The personas they created for us are being rolled out across other projects and used to inform communications and project delivery more broadly.”
The ICT department at Imperial College London provides tools and services to the university student and staff community. They are also responsible for supporting the university with complex technological projects and breakthroughs from aeronautics to clinical science.
The ICT department’s website had outgrown the content management team and was no longer meeting the needs of its audience. They contacted us to see if we could help them understand their audience, and ultimately help them to meet their needs through an easy to navigate website.
Starting with a stakeholder workshop and an audit of the content on the website, we quickly discovered that the site was not aimed at its audience and was primarily driven by internal requests. Not having an understanding of their audience and their priorities resulted in everything being published on the website…
Looking at both quantitative data from an online survey, Google analytics and heatmaps, alongside qualitative data from one on one user interviews, we built a picture of ICT’s main audience and developed personas to represent them.
With a clear picture about the users and their needs, we developed the site’s navigational structure and content priorities and illustrated this through a site map and screen examples. This toolkit of personas, site map, and screen examples (alongside the harsh facts of the research data) will enable Imperial’s ICT department to build a more user-centred website that specifically addresses the needs of their audience.
