Princeton International

The Client

Princeton International is devoted to telling Princeton University's international stories. It showcases and encourages students to explore international learning opportunities available through the university.

The Situation

Princeton International wanted to redesign its website to provide a unified source of information for students and staff looking for international learning opportunities and increase the number and diversity of students participating in these programs. As the primary source of information and resources for students and researchers interested in international programs and initiatives, the new website needed to be clean, modern, and engaging — a helpful resource for anyone in the Princeton community.

The Challenge

Princeton International’s goal was to enable users to:

• Discover opportunities to learn and research abroad
• Plan an academic curriculum around international study
• Learn about Princeton's academic partnerships 
• Get information about funding opportunities for students and faculty
• Review Princeton's global safety and security policies 
• Know more about Princeton's international community

Princeton currently offers undergrad students international study opportunities in over 140 countries, so updating the Princeton International website presented both technical and user experience challenges:

• Data-driven interactivity: Users needed to be able to easily create their learning itineraries using an interactive tool that provided instant results.
• Data synchronization: The new site needed to pull updated data about programs, news, international experiences, and country risk levels from diverse external sources, adding complexity. 
• Secure personalization: Users needed to be able to plan their study itinerary, including curriculum requirements, and share this information while maintaining user privacy.

The Solution

Princeton International partnered with design agency Evolving Web, which kicked off the project by collecting input from stakeholders in different departments. Evolving Web conducted project research and a series of user journey workshops to create user stories that described the expected website behavior, then evaluated and prioritized the stories to ensure that development tasks were clear and actionable and that the users were at the center of the design process. 

During the project, Evolving Web conducted extensive usability testing with students to assess one of the project’s most innovative features, the Global Arc, an interactive, intuitive itinerary-building interface where students can select their international programs.

The Results

Evolving Web built 29 landing pages and 19 components for Princeton International on Drupal 9. The result is a clean, easy-to-use website that opens opportunities to students who may not typically seek international studies or who feel less confident in planning their curriculum. Through custom modules, Princeton International achieves content synchronization with multi-source data aggregation of news, course information, country risk levels and more, while ensuring granular personalization in Drupal.

Through the first-of-its-kind Global Arc tool, users share their learning trajectories and allow advisors to serve students more effectively. This feature meets Princeton International’s desire to empower students to be more self-sufficient, enabling them to explore their options before reaching out to the university for support. Using Acquia Search, Evolving Web created a new search tool and interface that enables more flexible, faster website search capabilities.