Campbell University Admissions

Given that VisionPoint Marketing had already worked with Campbell, we were well-versed in the University’s environment, its offering, attributes and differentiators. But in order to drive admissions, we really wanted to better understand how prospective students navigated the website. What paths were they taking? What questions did they have? Where were they hindered? What key features led to application?

With assistance from real prospective students, VisionPoint conducted several rounds of user testing to answer these questions. The results would ultimately fuel our recommendations for increasing applications and boosting admissions. Test subjects represented the target audience of Campbell’s Undergraduate Admissions: a mix of males and females, both juniors and seniors in high schools from central North Carolina, first generation students as well as those whose parents had attended some sort of post-secondary education.

Students were asked to complete tasks ranging from researching majors at Campbell to answering questions about the school’s values and religious affiliation. Each task was designed to get to the marrow of a user’s decision-making process, carefully focused on real information sought by prospective students when applying to college. Usability software and web cams were used to record each user’s facial expressions as well as level of difficulty and general interaction with the website.

In addition to user testing amongst prospective students, VisionPoint solicited the opinions of current students at Campbell via a web survey. Of the 240 students who completed the survey, 58 were freshman as of May 2011 (meaning they had completed the admissions process within the last year). Through a series of content and page-specific questions as well as a freeform field for opinions and suggestions, VisionPoint gathered data that—when combined with user experience testing—became the foundation of our recommendations to Campbell’s leadership.