Helping 11,000+ grad students find their next step

I audited and rewrote key grad.ubc.ca pages around where a student is in their degree, and built them in Drupal. On the dev site, the redesigned Managing your Program page saw a 65% increase in scroll depth over 2 weeks.

grad.ubc.ca serves 11,000+ graduate students at UBC Vancouver, plus faculty and staff. Many pages were written from the institution's side: long flat lists, descriptions that began with "Information about…", and no sentence saying who a page was for.

As Web Strategy & Communications Assistant at UBC Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, I audit and rewrite key pages, build new ones from scattered source material, and implement them in Drupal. I also lead the community sessions and A/B tests behind the site's wider restructuring.

Managing your Program put 17 topics in one flat list. Every description began with "Information about…" and ended in "Read more", and nothing at the top said what the page was for.

My audit found the same patterns across the site: vague links, jargon, missing lead-ins and headings out of order.

I lead facilitation for roughly 90-minute online sessions with faculty, staff, and students. A community-wide survey covered anyone who couldn't attend.

Recruitment ran through UBC Today, GradGlance, UBC Events, and partner channels, with registration in Qualtrics.

Each change answered a problem from the sessions and the content audit.

I grouped Managing your Program's 17 topics under four headings that follow a degree from start to finish: Getting started, Staying on track, Changes and time away, and Work and benefits. The Graduate Game Plan moved from the bottom of the page to a "Start here" link at the top.

I first tried sorting by program type (course-based master’s, thesis-based master’s, PhD). But most topics apply to everyone, so students would still scroll past repeats. Ordering topics by when a student needs them, from registering to graduating, matched how people described their degree in the sessions.

1. 1Before: 17 topics in one flat list.
2. 2After: the Graduate Game Plan moved from the bottom to a "Start here" link.
3. 3After: topics grouped under four student-journey headings.

A student scans four headings instead of 17 links.

I audited Managing your Program, Life in Vancouver, Student Responsibilities, the homepage and the Blog against the G+PS Writing Guidelines, UBC Voice and Tone Guide, G+PS Web Styles and a content checklist.

Most fixes were at the sentence level: descriptions rewritten as actions addressed to "you", "Read more" replaced with links that say where they go, and a lead-in on every page.

I fixed links and headings first, because the sessions showed people skim before they read. Longer rewrites came second.

1. 1"Read more" became a link that names where it goes.
2. 2"Information about…" became an action addressed to "you".
3. 3All-caps headings became sentence case, so they're easier to scan.

Every edit traced back to a written standard, so changes weren't a matter of taste.

I built two new pages, Health, Wellbeing and Safety and Life as a Grad Student, from scattered resource docs and comments from several team members.

Content owners worried about losing accuracy, so I grouped and reordered their text instead of silently removing it, and only cut sections the team agreed to drop.

This took longer than rewriting from scratch, but owners approved changes quickly because nothing they wrote disappeared.

1. 1Before: source text spread across a draft doc with comments from several team members.
2. 2After: crisis support grouped into one block at the top of the page.

Change what a student sees first, not what the page says.

I presented my recommendations to my manager as a memo, citing the style guide rule behind each one.

I showed a list layout and a card layout side by side so the team could choose.

Showing both layouts let the team see the tradeoff themselves: the list is faster to scan, while cards fit a short description and a clear link for each topic.

Putting the rule under each recommendation made it a conversation about standards, not preferences.

I implemented the redesigns myself in Drupal, the CMS the site runs on. The new pages are built on the site's dev environment, ready for the team to launch.

I wrote HTML on top of the site's existing widget components, like cards, column layouts, and collapsible headings, so new pages stay consistent with the live design.

Building it myself meant I could fix spacing and wording in place, instead of handing off specs and waiting for another round.

Designed within the system, so nothing broke on handoff.

Before launch, I A/B tested the redesigned pages on the dev site against the current versions, using Crazy Egg heatmaps, scroll maps, scroll depth and time on page.

I learned that citing a written standard under every edit turned style debates into quick decisions, and kept content owners on board when their text moved.