The Ontario College Application Service (OCAS) is a non-profit corporation that provides college application and data warehousing services to Ontario’s college system in English and French. It does so through its applicant website and a centralized data warehouse of applicant information for colleges, high schools and government.
In September 2008, Endeca asked RealDecoy to help revise OCAS’s Program Finder and improve the organization’s website, enhancing college applicants’ experience while on the site.
RealDecoy successfully revised the Program Finder tool on the OCAS website by implementing an improved Endeca solution.
THE CHALLENGE
A faceted search tool
The OCAS’s website had a Program Finder tool that allowed students to search for college programs of interest to them. This tool was designed to convert visitors into applicants to Ontario colleges.
The tool allowed prospective students to search for programs using a variety of criteria or “facets”. The combination of facets would filter the results of the search to provide a list of programs that would meet the visitor’s requirements for length, location, subject, and more.
Slow and hard to use
However, the tool was confusing to use and was extremely slow. The original implementation had required numerous calls to the database which slowed the system down exponentially. Additionally, the interface was not very intuitive and users were unsure of how the system worked, even as they were using it.
Our goal was to redevelop the Program Finder while maintaining the overall structure and look and feel of the existing site that the tool was part of. The redesign effort was intended to dramatically improve users’ interactions with the site, providing them with quicker matches to specific college programs.
A wealth of information
Including all programs from every college across Ontario in a single repository involves massive amounts of data. RealDecoy’s task was to develop a search tool that would allow users to find exactly the information they needed, easily and quickly. We had to build a tool that leveraged Endeca’s functionality. All content on the site had to be indexed properly and every program had to have keywords associated with it.
The revised Program Finder had to enable OCAS’s staff to show certain content about programs on the website based on a visitor’s search results. Staff needed the ability to view reports and maintain thesaurus entries on the site’s back-end so that if a visitor searched for an item similar to another in the Program Finder, the visitor would be directed to the most appropriate content.
Different users, different needs
The Program Finder had to serve high school-aged students searching for college diploma programs as well as a growing number of mature students looking for continuing education programs. RealDecoy couldn’t simply pigeonhole the 16 to 22 age group: the tool had to be accessible to a broad range of users.
OUR SOLUTION
Improving performance
We looked at the previous system and made determined that the system performance could be dramatically improved through some adjustments to how the front end of the site communicated with the Endeca Pipeline. These adjustments dramatically improved the performance of the site.
Developing usability
RealDecoy began by creating wireframes to devise the functionality of the Program Finder and gauge how visitors would interact to get the information they needed. We researched other post secondary institutions and consulted with OCAS on what keywords to use, how content should be filtered and displayed, and what the content had priority. We also added new cross promotion and linking of content between the College overview pages, a map of Ontario allowing users to quickly find colleges based on where they wanted to attend school along with improved breadcrumbs and pagination to improve the user’s ability to navigate the site.
New landing pages and SEO
RealDecoy also helped OCAS to take advantage of the features of Endeca that were not originally implemented. This included the use of merchandizing rules to direct users to landing pages for specific searches.
Additionally, we implemented Endeca’s Search Engine Optimization module to ensure that the URLs for the search results contained friendly URLs—those that actually make sense to humans instead of strings of characters and numbers. This dramatically improved how the OCAS site ranks in search engines such as Google and Bing.
In the end, we made a very complex tool usable and user-friendly.
