Simmons School of Management
Billing itself a leading center for innovative teaching, research and discourse on women, leadership, and management, the Simmons School of Management presented a number of challenges in its site redesign.
The School offers a demanding management education to women MBA and undergraduate students, and is also a leading-edge provider of executive education, consulting services, and applied research to senior management in business, government, and the nonprofit sector. Moreover, it offers annually the world's largest conference devoted to women in leadership. As such, it is a deceptively large, complex organization, with ambitious goals and aspirations.
Working closely with Brian Talbot and marketing partners at Simmons, we undertook an extensive strategy definition and information architecture phase. Using surveys, focus groups, and formal usability testing, we tested and validated assumptions about site use and perception, which directly informed a comprehensive information architecture development. A first step of the redesign involved bringing all the diverse programs together under one navigation system and visual identity. We are in the process of reworking each program step-by-step to reflect what our research tells us is most effective.
This site is built using web standards, which not only contributes to its overall accessibility, but also positively affects organic search engine listings as part of an overall search engine optimization project. It is editable by content owners via an enterprise content management system.
