Delivering an engaging website redesign
How a user-centric design brought course offerings to life for international students
As a leading education provider, our client has a global reach, shaping the education and careers of individuals worldwide. To meet the diverse needs of international students looking to undertake a degree preparation (or pathway) course, our client wanted to redesign its website, bringing a user-centric design to the forefront.
Putting users first
While understanding our client’s desire to improve the online experience of two particular audience segments—international students and third-party agents—our team worked to improve content engagement across the site. The project's aim was to increase engagement and drive more course enquiries, a key lead-generation metric for the business.
Navigating multiple audiences and stakeholder requirements
From the initial brief, we understood the requirement to deliver the project quickly and used agile sprints to complete each task within the project efficiently. The project contained many complexities. The site had multiple audiences to consider, each with different needs and goals. The stakeholders across the business also had varying requirements for the website. As it’s a core business tool, teams from across the company needed to be taken on the journey to designing a new website.
User testing and the transformation of the website
Our user-centred and insight-driven design approach helped overlay the core business information gathered in stakeholder meetings with insights from user testing on the existing website. Putting its customers at the centre of the design process brought new life to the website. Insights from users enabled our team to flip the emphasis on the site from education to inspiration, bringing a new focus to the website.
Site content was crafted using a balanced, editorial approach, making it easier to digest and navigate. This significantly improved the user experience for the key audiences. Two robust rounds of international user testing were undertaken to ensure the new website design worked as effectively as possible.
Remarkable results
The website redesign project was a great success. Post-launch, the website saw a significant decrease in drop-off rates from organic search traffic, one of the hardest web audiences to engage, seeing a drop from 45.8% to 33.2%. The conversion rate to complete a lead capture form also increased 1.5 times on the new website, helping our client achieve its goals of engaging its international students and agents more and driving those all-important leads to the business.
