New School of Law Website Launched

The new School of Law website at the University of San Diego aims to deliver information to prospective students exploring careers in the law field.

We surveyed prospective and current law 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.

As a result, the new law 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.
• Customized audience pages for our prospective and current students to learn about school news, events, or programs in a more personalized way.
• An academic calendar that is front and center on the new law home page. This same resource is also integrated into other parts of the site, since we learned that it was one of the top used and looked for features on the previous law website.
• An interactive home page "Explore San Diego" area that showcases locations around the city where law students can study, find jobs, and find resources for learning more about the city.
• A new faculty and staff directory with filtering, search, research information, and larger photos for learning about the award-winning faculty at the university. A searchable faculty expertise listing is a special highlight to help showcase the backgrounds, experience, and interests of our faculty community. This resource ties into faculty scholarship and course description information to make it easier for students to find what they are looking for.
• A newly enhanced and integrated study abroad system which highlights opportunities for students based on law world region or term.
• A new student organizations database housing information about the 50 student organizations that are part of the School of Law.
• A new News Center and Events Calendar, both sharing information about the school, its faculty and staff, and related centers and institutes.
• Newly written and edited content throughout the website, which guided the architecture and the design process for the new site.
  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.