Increasing the Effectiveness of the Barrett, The Honors College Website for Students

Barrett, The Honors College provides its students with many resources to succeed, and most information about these resources are located on the Barrett website. But due to issues with user experience and user interface design on the website, many students are not able to locate these resources, therefore, preventing students from taking full advantage of what Barrett has to offer. This potentially leads current students to perceive that being in the Barrett program does not benefit them, eventually leading to burn out and even withdrawal from Barrett. By improving the experience for Barrett students in the “Academics” section of the site, which is the section of the site Barrett students tend to have the most experience with, the Barrett site’s image (and therefore, Barrett’s image as a whole) will improve among students.
This project involved looking at the websites of fifteen other honors colleges and programs to compare their implementations of academic requirements information, advising information, and thesis/creative project information with Barrett's. These findings as well as general observations made about the Barrett site are discussed, and suggestions on how to resolve major issues are given. Through looking at the Barrett site from a student’s perspective, the goal of this project to provide a glimpse into what students find problematic about the site, and what students would do to fix these problems.