Concordia College
A Midwest liberal arts college sought to bring more momentum to their inherent global draw. To achieve this, they needed to find a way to immerse prospective students in the unique, personalized tour experience that historically had been a turning point for many in their college search — from thousands of miles away
Service
UX design, Website design, Design system
Sector
Education
Year
2012
Problem to Be Solved
With a clickable map tied to a few photos and descriptive text, Concordia College’s existing virtual tour was meant to introduce the campus to people around the world without the costly travel. But in reality, the tool did little to truly help people understand what it means to be a student at the school. This was a major concern because, for many students, it was the tour that solidified their decision to attend the historic institution.The school needed to somehow recreate the in-person tour experience complete with friendly tour guides, picturesque walks between buildings and personalized stops along the way. All while contending with the limitations of early video streaming technology and dwindling attention spans of a young audience.
Project Goals and Challenges
Create a seamless video experience given the limitations of streaming in a pre-Netflix world
Introduce a remote liberal arts college to prospective students without requiring travel
Connect with high school seniors based on their individual interests
Adhere to a fixed concept, production and launch timeline to introduce the campus to the spring graduating class
Unite a cross-functional agency team to execute the single largest creative contract of the year
My Role
As the creative director on the project, I was involved at every turn — from leading brainstorms and client reviews to coordinating a 20-person, cross-functional agency team to acting as the lead flash developer.
After our team had firmed up the initial concept, I led the pitch to sell the clients on our idea to translate the in-person tour to an interactive virtual experience with 1,860,480 possible individualized paths a user could travel through the school. With the client on board, it was my job to ensure the experience could be delivered seamlessly to households around the globe while pushing current video streaming technology to its limits.Play00:0702:20MuteSettingsEnter fullscreen02:19
The Process
There were three critical challenges we’d need to take on over the course of the project. We had to bring the humanity of the in-person tour experience to a virtual space. We had to allow people to curate their own tour, keeping them engaged at every stop. And we had to do it all while battling the technical hurdles of video streaming at the time. To tackle the first obstacle we worked with real campus tour guides and helped them bring their gift of campus storytelling and connecting with students to the screen. Additionally, video shoots around the campus included real routes and current students, giving users the illusion of strolling to class on a spring day.
The second hurdle we overcame by building out unique personas that would allow prospective students to choose their personalized tours based on what interested them most about the campus. If they happened upon a facility that didn’t interest them, they could pop off the route to check out a one-off destination or create a tour entirely their own.
We overcame the final and largest obstacle with intensive amounts of research paired with trial and error. After a great deal of digging, we found a company that could handle distributing video files at the scale we needed. And, in the weeks leading up to launch, we fine-tuned elements like constant bit rates and frame rates to compress the experience while keeping it clean for the user. To keep students engaged as the videos loaded, we developed an interactive preloader that took them through an aerial experience of the campus.
Results
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