Middlebury College
Virtual Tour, Online Map, Website Copy
Middlebury College needed a way to give prospective students a sense of living and studying on campus when they couldn’t host tours during the pandemic. The college saw this restriction as an opportunity to make the college selection process more accessible and equitable for all students, even after the end of the pandemic.
Working with the college, I managed a redesign of the campus virtual tour and online map to convey the necessary hard information while giving prospective students a sense of place, and enabling them to see themselves at Middlebury from wherever they viewed the website.
I conducted extensive interviews with current students, prospective students, professors, and campus historians, as well as desk research with Middlebury Special Collections, campus reference books, past student newspapers, memoirs, and letters to find stories and details that added history, color, and experience to the final deliverables.
An online tour to rival in-person tours.
I first rearranged the tour to create a natural flow that matched moving around campus. I then replaced bare-bones blurbs with descriptions that conveyed engaging history, current uses, importance, and how students interact with, and move through, theses spaces.
A map that gave feeling, not just geography.
Middlebury wanted students to be able to follow their interests and see themselves moving across campus with each click of the virtual map. I expanded the number of interactive locations and created copy for each that gave a sense of place and purpose rather than just an encyclopedic repetition of the donor names and construction dates.