New Kroc School of Peace Studies Website Launched

The new Kroc School of Peace Studies website at the University of San Diego aims to deliver information to prospective students looking to make an impact in peace and justice.

We surveyed prospective undergraduate and graduate students, and later in the project conducted a usability study with our prospective audience to ensure the design and intended usability appealed to their needs.

The Kroc School website is filled with new features that will help make the information-seeking process easier for prospective audiences:

• A responsive design which allows site visitors to access information anywhere at any time.
• A hero area that uses repeating hexagons for photo layout, which connects to physical elements in the school's building and is used as a brand element in the school's marketing materials.
• A home page "Impact Filter" for our prospective audience to learn about school news, events, or programs that connect with specific issues they are interested in.
• An abundance of database-driven content on subjects such as women peacemakers, current and past students, distinguished lecture series, and publication archives, making the content updates for maintainers easier and the layouts consistent from resource to resource. Fifteen new systems were built to accommodate the various content needs of the new website.
• Newly written and edited content throughout the website, which guided the architecture and the design process for the new site.
• A new News Center, Events Calendar, Spotlights hub, and Blogs all sharing information about the school, its faculty and staff, and related centers and institutes.
• A social media hub powered by TwineSocial to aggregate the school's content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
• A new faculty and staff directory with filtering, search, research information, and larger photos for learning about the award-winning faculty at the university.

The information architecture is strategically organized, and content was mindfully raised from the department and center level in the previous website to the school level on the new website, alleviating the need for students to track information in multiple places to find what they are looking for.

The plan is to use analytics and surveying tools to adjust to the changing needs of our prospective audiences and to allow the site to evolve with those needs.