We received positive feedback from Centennial College.
The website now meets the WCAG 2.0 AA requirements, which allows all perspective students browsing more than 260 programs.
The newly designed website and the SEO drove more than 18% of the traffic than last design.
The Career Explorer received more than 12% of the clicks than last design, and had driven 8% more inquiries regarding the programs (4 months after the launch).

Focus Group Reserch

I conducted the focus group research regarding the following concerns and documented the feedback:

Understanding the Users

Who they are: The users of the Centennial College website are mainly grade 11-12 students, or the parents of grade 10-12 students.
What they need: They are looking for programs that are best match to their future expectations, such as career direction, skill sets, credentials and program length.
Facts: Some of the users have a clear mind of what they are interested in and what they are looking for, while some of them have a vague picture of the career direction, but need some guidance.
The Painpoints: Users don’t have sufficient or effective guidance to find their career path. They can even get lost when browsing programs from a variety of the industries and the quantity of the programs.

Understanding the Problems

From the feedback we collected from users and the communications with the clients, we considered the following as the top two priorities. Users need effective guidance to find the career path or the program that match their future expectations, and the current website couldn’t provide with efficient access to the matching programs and path-finding solutions. We started with visualizing a low-fidelity storyboard solutions based on the requirements.
Understanding the Programs
In order to provide effective solutions. I mapped out the current program interaction hierarchy to make it easy to access for both desktop & mobile.
Ideation

Solution Samples

Desktop Menu
Organizing programs & important into the side menu. Additonally need to make sure they are WCAG compliant.

Responsive
Making programs and levels accessible for all screen sizes.

Accessbility

The Centennial College Official website not only meets WCAG 2.0 AA requirements, but also the simlified footer is more friendly for audio-nav users.