Case Study
Degree Shopping, Made Simple: Rebuilding Program Discovery Around the Student, Not the Institution
A centralized degree discovery experience designed to help prospective students find degrees by interest instead of institutional hierarchy, collapsing a four-click funnel into a single qualifying moment and moving genuinely interested students further into the recruitment pipeline.
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Overview
The university's existing degree browsing experience was built around how the institution organized itself, not around how a prospective student thinks.
To find a program, a student had to know that degrees lived under Academics, navigate to the right college, find the right department within it, and then arrive at a program list. Four clicks of assumed institutional knowledge before they saw a single program name that might actually appeal to them. Students who didn't already know how the university was structured, which is what most prospective students were effectively being asked to learn the org chart before they could answer the question they actually came to answer: Does this place offer something I care about?
The page I built collapsed that funnel into one moment. A single, flat, plain-language list of every program the university offered, organized alphabetically by topic rather than by college or department. No insider knowledge required. No hierarchy to navigate. Just programs, described in the words a student would actually use to think about their interests, with degree type visible at a glance.
The goal wasn't just discoverability. It was a qualification. A student who lands on this page and finds something that connects clicks through. A student who was never serious self-selects out. Six months of live user data proved it was working before I ever walked into a room to formally make the case for it.
Leadership approved it. The page launched that afternoon. It has been live ever since.
Role & Responsibilities
I identified the problem, initiated the project, defined the scope, designed the information architecture, built the page within the existing WordPress theme, and launched it to production, without waiting for formal approval, to gather real user behavior before making the institutional case.
Responsibilities included defining topic-based categories that corresponded with student intent rather than departmental structure, working with Academic Affairs to standardize program data across colleges, assuring accessibility and responsiveness across devices, and conducting a full codebase refactor after content integration revealed new behavior challenges across screen sizes.
The project required navigating institutional approval processes, departmental politics, and the kind of organizational friction that attaches itself to anything that changes how an institution presents itself publicly.
Discovery & Strategy
The old funnel made a fundamental assumption that a prospective student arrives knowing how a university is structured. That assumption was wrong, and the traffic data confirmed it. Students were dropping off before they ever reached program pages because the path to getting there required institutional knowledge they didn't have and shouldn't have needed.
The strategic change was obvious once the real problem was named. Stop organizing the browsing experience around the institution's internal hierarchy and start organizing it around the words a student would actually use to describe their interests. Criminal Justice, not College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Family Studies and Human Development, not the Department of Behavioral Sciences. The program name is the category. The student's interest is navigation.
Another deliberate decision was to launch into production rather than a prototype. A static mockup or a staged environment would have produced assumptions. Six months of live user behavior produced evidence. The data that came back, traffic flowing directly from the discovery page to individual program pages, with the old Academic hierarchy page losing overall traffic, was the clearest possible signal that the page was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
UX / UI Execution
The design is deliberately simple because simplicity was the point.
A flat alphabetical list. Plain-language program names. Degree type: Major, Minor, Emphasis, is the only secondary information shown at this stage. No college grouping. No departmental nesting. No institutional hierarchy is visible anywhere on the page.
That restraint was intentional and considered. Every organizational element removed was a piece of assumed knowledge that a student no longer needed for reading the page. The less the student had to know about the university's internal structure, the faster they could answer the question they actually came to answer.
The page also functions as a qualification layer. Someone scanning this list who finds three programs that match their interests is a different kind of visitor than someone who bounces after two seconds. The analytics bore this out: the students who engaged with the page went further into the site. The ones who weren't genuinely interested left quickly. That separation is the recruitment funnel doing its job, and the page was designed to enable it.
Technical Implementation
The page was built within the existing WordPress theme without new infrastructure or plugins. Program data was gathered and normalized in collaboration with Academic Affairs, which required reconciling naming differences across colleges and guaranteeing degree type classifications were accurate and consistent.
After the initial launch, content integration surfaced responsive behavior issues across device sizes that weren't apparent in the original build. Rather than patching them individually, I refactored the full codebase and layout to handle the basic structural issues. That decision added time but produced a firmer and maintainable result than a series of targeted fixes would have.
Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity provided the behavioral data used to validate the page's performance and build the case for formal adoption.
Process & Collaboration
The project moved without formal approval initially because the approval process would have slowed it to a halt before anyone could see whether it worked. The decision to launch in production was deliberate; real user behavior is a more persuasive argument than a proposal document, and six months of data is harder to dismiss than a prototype.
When I brought the analytics to leadership, the data made the case clearly. Program page traffic from the discovery page was strong. The old hierarchical Academic page was losing relative traffic. Students were finding programs and moving deeper into the site.
The conversation that followed was more complicated than the data warranted. Departments raised concerns about not being explicitly named. Auxiliary offices discussed their visibility. Leadership weighed how Academic Affairs would respond to a page that organized programs by topic rather than by college.
None of those concerns were about whether the page was working. The data had already answered that. They were about internal recognition and organizational politics, the kind of friction that attaches to anything that changes how an institution presents itself publicly.
Leadership approved it. I launched the updated version that afternoon. The debate didn't change the outcome. It just made the path to it more uncomfortable than it needed to be.
Results & Impact
The page delivered on its main objective. Prospective students could find programs matching their interests in a single view without navigating institutional hierarchy or requiring insider knowledge of how the university was organized.
Traffic patterns confirmed the qualification effect. Students who engaged with the discovery page moved directly to individual program pages at a measurably higher rate than the old funnel produced. The hierarchical Academic page lost relative traffic, as intended. The new page was doing the job; the old funnel wasn't.
The refactored codebase resolved the responsive behavior issues surfaced after content integration, producing a stable page that has remained in production without structural issues since launch.
Long-Term Impact
The page established something the university's web presence hadn't previously had: a single entry point for program discovery that was organized around student intent rather than institutional structure.
That shift carried implications beyond the page itself. It demonstrated that the university could present its academic-level programs in plain language without losing institutional credibility, that topic-based organization was more useful to prospective students than departmental hierarchy, and that real user data could make the case for changes that proposals and mockups couldn't.
It also surfaced a deeper question. Getting students to the right program in a single page view solved the discovery problem, but a student who finds a program they're interested in still has to decide whether to apply. The pages they landed on weren't built to answer that decision. The discovery page qualified the student. What happened next was a different problem entirely, and one the university still hasn't fully solved.
Reflection
This project confirmed something I already suspected but hadn't yet tested at this scale: that launching a working solution into production is a more effective institutional argument than any proposal document.
The approval process exists for good reasons. It also creates conditions where good ideas get delayed, diluted, or killed before anyone can see whether they work. Launching first and measuring second isn't reckless if the solution is sound and the data collection is rigorous. It's just a faster path to the evidence that institutions actually respond to.
The politics in the approval meeting were real and predictable. Departments wanted recognition. Auxiliary offices wanted visibility. Leadership wanted cover. None of that was about students. The data was about students. That gap, between what the internal conversation optimized for and what the page was actually designed to do, is the most honest thing this case study can say about how institutional decisions get made.