Grand Rapids Community College

Goal #1: Help students navigate the site

Our research-driven discovery uncovered that, although prospective and current students were the highest priority audiences, they struggled to navigate the website. A particular usability challenge centered on organizing and surfacing their many academic programs, courses, and new academic pathways. For instance, we discovered there was nowhere for students to see GRCC’s over 145 academic programs in one place. We worked in close collaboration with the GRCC team to understand, untangle, and reorganize the content into a simple, intuitive, and student-centric structure. Beyond creating better content relationships, we also automated program pages to pull content directly from the academic catalogue. This reduced both the manual effort for editors to update content and for the web team to pull reports and fix broken links.

Goal #2: Design an eye-catching and accessible visual brand

The mandate for visual design that would both wow audiences and be uniquely GRCC came directly from the institution’s president. We aligned on the visual design direction before creating mockups of individual pages. The new brand expression features bold colors and broad and representative imagery of the GRCC community. We kept the WCAG 2.1 level AA accessibility in mind when selecting colors, designing interactive elements, and building the site. Even elements invisible to the users, like making H-tags within paragraphs mandatory and hiding screen reader text in empty columns, helped ensure the site stayed accessible.

Goal #3: Empower the GRCC team

We understand the politics and personalities that can come into play within a higher education institution. Beyond speaking directly to GRCC’s president early in the process, we hosted meetings with leadership to make sure the project continued to have everyone’s blessing. Over the course of our collaboration, GRCC’s web team saw the confidence their institutional community had in them continue to grow.

During the build phase, we empowered their in-house developer to complete tasks as a natural extension of our team. We also worked directly with GRCC’s product owner to prioritize features, so we were building the most important things first.

Goal #4: Look to the future

The redesign launched in early 2021. The website’s accessibility tested at 96.3 on SiteImprove, well above the education industry standard score of 77. In the first quarter of the site being live, traffic to the “Apply to GRCC” page increased by 90.5% over the previous year. This follows the trend of users becoming more intentional across the website, with actionable revenue-generating pages as the top five most trafficked pages on the site.

Since then, we have been working with GRCC to prioritize their support wishlist and contribute to post-launch initiatives.

Before working with Kalamuna, our website was unnavigable. Kalamuna was able to find a solution that could fit the needs of our internal stakeholders and, more importantly, our students. They worked as an extension of our team, as everyone was very well-versed in the higher ed industry. After the redesign launched, I watched users become more intentional across our website. That is the biggest triumph for me. I have coworkers saying, ‘I just open our website and smile now every time I do.’Leigh Jajuga, Director of Web Content and Digital Strategy, GRCC