Education Minnesota Website

Background

Education Minnesota is the largest advocate for public education in its state. Supporting over 70,000 members working in all positions throughout the education system and across the entire state, Education Minnesota’s website serves as the central hub for communication and distributing benefits to its members.

Project type: Public Website Platform: Kentico

View site

Goals

High Monkey Consulting worked closely with the Education Minnesota team and website users to redesign the organization’s website and improve the user experience based on addressing issues found during several rounds of usability testing.

A new Information Architecture was needed for the EDMN website that reflected uscer-centric page layouts, design changes, and mobile browser compatibility, as well as changes to the language used within the website.

Another goal of the EDMN website was to provide a secure portal for 70,000 members to access premium content related to union activities, contract negotiations, and events.

Challenges

Large public website with a wide array of content
Critical site content not being located by end-users
Low site traffic
Content needs for both the general public and secured content for its 70,000 members
Content security is layered depending on user’s access levels

Services Required

Search and Content Strategy

UX and DX Design

Website Design and Build

Solution

Faced with this not uncommon scenario, we got our box of usability tools and went to work. We started by getting to know Education Minnesota a little better – what their purpose and objectives are as an organization, and by interviewing actual members and site users to understand what their needs were. We compared this to current-state web analytics and began developing or usability test. We again went back to actual users of the site and had them perform some tasks on the site – while we recorded their actions, thoughts and facial expressions. From the careful and experienced analysis of this data, we were able to develop an actionable list of recommendations and next steps for Education Minnesota to make changes that would have a proven impact on their user’s experience.