I recently did an audit, reorganization, and rewriting of the content for one of the colleges of a major university. One of the programs had a “where are our alumni” page, and it was just a list of accordions by graduation year, with people listed therein.

But I thought, the title of this page is titled, “WHERE” are the alumni, not “WHEN.” So wouldn’t it make sense to sort the information by what sphere the person ended up in? So I read each person’s self-reported information and came up with the following categories:

• Corporate
• Research
• Faculty
• Student
• Private Practice
• Unknown

I then plugged those into a pie chart and came up with this.

The information on this page now tells a story.

• You can now see at a glance where graduates of this program end up and how the categories compare to each other (I was surprised how many alumni went into the corporate sector!)
• Instead of having to slog through each year section, then reading each piece of information, trying to find which alumni are in research, you can quickly jump to just the research section, where all the people are listed (descending by year) and then decide who you’re going to contact to see if they’re looking for research assistants. It’s all who you know! :)

I didn’t have any budget for better UI, but it would have been nice to be able to click on the pie slice and it will go to that section.