Start Here, Go Places.
Letting high school students envision the opportunities in accounting
Situation
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) wanted to connect with its early pipeline audiences–high school students. Their existing site wasn’t cutting the muster, so we completed a complete redesign.
Involvement
For this project, I conducted formative user research with students in our audience. In a series of one-on-one interviews, I gained insight into their perceptions, needs and challenges. Later, I conducted summative research to identify which of our concepts resonated best with them. With a team of designers, developers and copywriters, I developed the Web strategy. Later in the project, I built both paper and dynamic prototypes to define the site architecture and interactions.
The Web site is designed to give students a taste of the profession. Rather than encumbering them with all of the details, it focuses on giving them just enough information to think prospectively. It answers the questions “Why would I want to go into accounting?” and “What can I do in this profession?”
We found that many stereotypes still exist. Students who have not been exposed to accounting tend to view its practitioners as bookish, isolated number crunchers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the site, we break down these misconceptions. This could be by profiling actual CPAs in interesting industries–or letting them know that even a Butthole Surfer is a CPA.
Involvement Highlights
- Web strategy and feature definition
- Technical specifications (Facebook Connect, Telligent Community Server)
- Information architecture
- Prototyping
- Interaction design
- User testing strategy and execution: concept and preference testing
- Visual design
- Content strategy
- Quality assurance testing
Results
The site receives hundreds of visits per day, with time-on-site averaging over five minutes. In two months, with no promotion, we saw nearly 4,000 new accounts created. We’re constantly examining the analytics and updating popular content and features to improve performance.
