Tufts Now

Tufts Now, the news site for Tufts University, is a comprised of a team of talented writers who put out a regular publication that is read by the greater Boston area. Unfortunately, the CMS that the Tufts Now team had been using previously was not equipped give the Tufts team editorial power of homepage curation or the flexible components necessary to tell rich stories. User journey were also constricted, making it hard for users to find topics that they might want to read, while also leading them into dead ends with no suggestions to the user on what actions to take next.

Tufts University reached out to Eastern Standard to redesign of two of their websites, tufts.edu and news.tufts.edu, to a distinct visual strategy for both sites with a common visual language and rethink their UX strategy.

Team

Eastern Standard

Role

Branding

UX Design

Interactive Design

If you’d like to learn more about the work done for this project, please shoot me a message.

Contact Me

See the Prototype

Takeaways

01.

Let the brand flex. When working with a brand that serves multiple audiences, especially with an outdated brand, it’s important to illustrate how the brand can flex and bend in different ways in order to best serve the target audience. No one brand can be everything to everyone, especially in higher ed where you may be recruiting juniors with one hand and reaching out to high net worth donors with the other.

02.

Content is still king. The readership numbers, even with a poor user experience, was very high when we first started looking at the analytics. Though a handful visited daily, over 50% of users visited the site multiple times a month. What does it mean? Well, if your content is engaging and interesting enough, people will read it. Along with the talent at Tufts Now, this redesign can only make those readership numbers go even higher.

03.