The Admission Office at Harvey Mudd College sends recruitment pieces to more than 30,000 top math and science high school sophomores and juniors each year. Converting these top students from interested to applicant is the goal of various promotional strategies prepared in collaboration with the Office of Communications and Marketing. Admission staff sought to update their admission site to better appeal to prospective students who are used to simple text, engaging images, and video. The goal of the new site is to help convert prospective students and their families from interest to apply to enroll. The challenge is to communicate the details promised by the college's search piece (College statistics and general information), to answer the question “Academically, do you have what I want?
From the Judges
Harvey Mudd laid out an interesting challenge for itself in redesigning their admissions website: How do you capture the attention of the user in less than a minute? Based on prior metrics, the team knew that was all the time they had to grab site users, so they got straight to the point: bold headings, very streamlined display text, and a navigation that progressively pulled users further down the page. The site juggled a lot of content, but the well-organized layout gave users "choose your own adventure" options that didn't hinder the overall narrative. The fact that this project was accomplished in just five weeks, on virtually no budget, was especially impressive.
