Case Study

Morehouse College

Elevating a school in a class all its own

Overview

An institution steeped in history, legacy, and culture with alums like civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and entertainment icons Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson, Morehouse College is one of the most influential black men’s colleges in the United States. Spark was honored to collaborate with this important and influential college.

Services

Stakeholder interviews
Focus group moderation
Taxonomy testing & design
First impression testing
UX/UI design
Copywriting
Front-end development
Holistic QA

Technologies

Terminalfour

Timeframe

6 months

Visit

morehouse.edu

Challenge

Bringing more to the story

Morehouse had centered its story and identity around the rich heritage and historically notable alums. While impressive, this narrative wasn’t resonating in the same way it had. The new generation of students wanted to understand how the HBCU could benefit their today and their future rather than being tied to the past. Spark needed to bring the site up to modern experience standards and connect with today’s students to drive interest and admissions.

Process

Going back to school

To tackle this challenge, we needed to take the time upfront to understand the school, its faculty, and its students. We started our collaborative journey with campus visits, stakeholder interviews with faculty and staff, and focus groups with incoming first-year students. Insights gathered from these steps allowed us to develop the visuals and content to shape the experience. We also made sure to validate our approach and solutions through iterative testing. Approved work became quality assured, front-end code, and delivered to Terminalfour for implementation.

Our heuristic analysis uncovered and illustrated where issues existed within the current site structure.

Multiple taxonomy designs were drafted and tested to determine the best structure for organizing and navigating the new site.

Spark meticulously architected every detail of the modules and templates required to deliver content across the new Morehouse site.

Solution

A site to excite the next generation of dreamers and doers

To drive interest and admissions for a new generation of men, Spark created a comprehensive site redesign that tells Morehouse’s unique story through optimized site navigation and a modern, mobile-first approach to layout featuring powerful custom imagery, animation, and copy. In addition, our solution included a flexible template library allowing the college to test different content modules while maintaining consistency.