Azusa Pacific University came to Blue Flavor looking for a bit of help clarifying their plans for an upcoming redesign. We took a few minutes to sit down with Steve Heffernan (Asuza’s Web Marketing Engineer) and the Office of University Relations to talk about the project and get a sense of Steve’s experience working with Blue Flavor.
First…Let’s Define The Problem
Steve talks about why Asuza came to Blue Flavor and what their problems were.
“Our main goal in redesigning our website was simplification. We had many people tell us that our homepage was cluttered and hard to navigate, and we wanted to improve the experience for all of our audiences. In addition, our website was out-dated, and we were looking to bring it up to current standards.
“We turned to Blue Flavor because of their wide range of expertise and experience across multiple industries.”
Finding a solution
On our end, we saw this as a fun and unique opportunity to provide some experience and insight without the full engagement of a soup-to-nuts project. Knowing Asuza had in-house talent to work on concrete deliverables, we proposed a few ideas that focused more on education and affirmation.
We settled on a thorough expert review of their current site with tons of suggestions, resources for learning how to make it better, and a number of design explorations intended to illustrate solutions and provide an outsider’s view of their problems.
We reviewed their site from multiple angles and spoke with them at length about their audiences (which are wide and varied), goals and challenges. With these conversations firmly in mind, we spent quite a bit of time working through their site as a team, rooting out problems and putting our minds toward potential solutions and ideas.
Steve talks about the process and deliverables.
“The expert review was extremely helpful. It gave us an unbiased, outsider’s opinion of where our website should go. We had some general ideas of improvements we wanted to make (i.e. better usability, standards based changes, etc.), and the expert review provided specific examples of how they could be applied to our website, as well as many other ways our site could improve. It was great walking through the site review document with Keith for a deeper explanation of their suggestions, and getting all of our questions answered. Also, as we went through the process, it was reassuring to have a document that we could fall back on to make sure we were still on track.
“The design explorations were also helpful. Our office has a team of designers and we knew there would be a lengthy internal process of tweaking before we landed on a final version. What we were looking for from Blue Flavor was an example of how they would manage the large amount of content on our homepage and content pages through design. The designs Blue Flavor provided were intuitive, usable, and are very present in our final design. The content page especially was a huge improvement over what we had.”
Resolution
Having seen some of the early designs Asuza came up with, we can safely say they’re on the right track! They really are beautiful and we’re proud to have had a hand in the process. And we thoroughly enjoyed working with them. Luckily, Steve has some nice things to say about Blue Flavor as well:
“Blue Flavor was very easy to work with. They used language that our entire team could understand. They were able to adapt their services to what we needed, and always delivered either on, or sooner than, their projected dates. Our team felt like a high priority with Blue Flavor being willing to give feedback throughout the process.”
Thanks, Steve!
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