Future, Prospective, etc - what terminology is best?

[Kati Davis]

A ton of talk on twitter this morning about using the terminology "prospective students," "future students," "admissions," etc.

Here's a summary of my thoughts based on interviews and usability testing I've done with hundreds of students over the last three years:

-Students rarely use audience navigation unless it's the dominant navigation on the site. More on that here: http://blog.stamats.com/index.php/2009/08/14/are-your-web-site-user...

-We use audience navigation because we take market segmentation too literally. If your goal is to use your site as a recruiting tool, it should be externally facing and you shouldn't need a page just for "prospective students" because the whole public site is for them.

-Obviously, few schools have the perfect site (or are comfortable with a site) that can eliminate the link completely. Opt for "future" instead of "prospective" - prospective includes the word "prospect" which has a negative connotation. Future is presumptuous but it's the lesser of the two.

-Linking "future students" to admissions makes even having a "future student" link seem worthless

-Current students has sometimes confused high school students because they are technically a current student (just not at your institution). This is rare, but it has happened.

-The words "undergraduate" and even "admissions" aren't terms they're familiar with until they begin seriously searching for a college. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use them, it just means to make sure you focus on a task they might be interested in (scheduling a visit, applying, etc).


Keep in mind these are my opinions, not necessarily shared by everyone at Stamats. Do you agree or disagree?

BUT I know everyone values the power of statistics on these kinds of topics. Great timing because this morning I'm submitting questions for our annual TeensTALK survey and I'll see if this topic can be incorporated.

Speaking of - any other questions you'd like to survey prospective students about in relation to their web usage?

[Dave Olsen]

I think the "market segmentation" bit is a really interesting point. Recently I've had to focus much more on "what do you want to do" as opposed to "who are you" that it's really changed my opinion of how home pages should be organized. Tasks cut across audiences leading to more relevant information/organization for users as well as decreasing the amount of duplicated links & content. Maybe a "Learn about [school name]" would be better (even better just "Apply") than any of the audience options.

[J. Todd Bennett]

Kati-- I agree with everything you said here and have been advising institutions the same for several years. My opinions, too, are based on interviews, focus groups, surveys and usability tests with thousands of high school students across the country.

Many institutions feel that have to have the prospective students link because a) everyone else has it or b) their site's architecture and content are so reflective of the org chart that there's no other way to bring it together other than to collect a bunch of relevant links in one place.

I especially like your point about prospective students links going to admissions. Once upon a time, all prospective student marketing happened in the admissions website, because nobody else cared. Not so these days. Admissions is an office or area of the site concerned with tasks and info related to the admissions process. Why on earth would anyone think to look there for academic information (majors)?

[Kati Davis]

Do you think you've honed in on the tasks because you've been more involved in mobile where you need to be more to-the-point? Is that being applied back to the full version of the site then too?

Dave Olsen said:

I think the "market segmentation" bit is a really interesting point. Recently I've had to focus much more on "what do you want to do" as opposed to "who are you" that it's really changed my opinion of how home pages should be organized. Tasks cut across audiences leading to more relevant information/organization for users as well as decreasing the amount of duplicated links & content. Maybe a "Learn about [school name]" would be better (even better just "Apply") than any of the audience options.

[Dave Olsen]

We've also gotten limited feedback on mobile and it's been of the "This is now my home page!" variety. That's obviously for a very targeted demo though. I would love to see the lessons learned make their way back to the home page but the latter comes with a lot of political baggage that's not easy to get past :)

Kati Davis said:

Do you think you've honed in on the tasks because you've been more involved in mobile where you need to be more to-the-point? Is that being applied back to the full version of the site then too?

[Julie Wight]

I agree, Dave. The "what do you want to do" is much more important in terms of organizing a site. It's more intuitive and is much more direct and action-oriented. The "who are you" needs to move more in the language that we use. I'm hoping to start moving our university's website in that direction. Right now it's really pretty passive and the navigation is not really helpful or intuitive at all.

Dave Olsen said:

I think the "market segmentation" bit is a really interesting point. Recently I've had to focus much more on "what do you want to do" as opposed to "who are you" that it's really changed my opinion of how home pages should be organized. Tasks cut across audiences leading to more relevant information/organization for users as well as decreasing the amount of duplicated links & content. Maybe a "Learn about [school name]" would be better (even better just "Apply") than any of the audience options.