Subject Page redesign

OVERVIEW

My role:

• Collaborating within a product team, and leading the end-to-end UX process.

• UX activities: discovery research, user interviews, heuristic review, usability testing, UI design, experiment analysis.

🔎 DISCOVERY

How might we help prospects see the value of Open Access subjects?

We drafted an opportunity tree to address the business outcome of increasing prospect ROI and engagement on product pages. The aim was to make it easy for prospects to understand and choose Open Access subjects.

💡 Key learnings so far:

• The common misconception is that to do a subject, you must be in a degree.

• Prospects don’t often see the value of doing a single subject, unless they speak to an advisor

• There are a number of benefits of doing an Open Access subject, unique to Open Universities Australia:

  • Students can “try out” a subject before committing to a whole degree

  • Students can use specific subjects as a pathway into a degree, regardless of their study history

  • Eligibility for government funding

  • Flexibility to upskill or study something for the love of learning in a particular topic.

  • Ability to do the course within a short time (feels less overwhelming)

• There is a clear opportunity to highlight the value propositions on the website, specifically on the Subject pages.

Synthesised themes:

1. Clearly highlight Open Access subjects

2. Reduce cognitive load on the page

3. Make the information easy to digest

As next steps, the new ideas were mapped onto the opportunity tree. These would then either be validated through small experiments separately, or incorporated into the page redesign altogether.

Card sorting

I conducted a card sorting exercise to understand the information hierarchy on the page

💡 Key learnings:

• Start dates and course information were the most important information

• “What other students do after completing the course” was the least important information.

• Items that were least important could be de-prioritized from the MVP build

• Overall hierarchy informed the design, and to be later validated with user testing

✏️ DESIGN & TEST

Incremental improvements

Experimentation: A/B tests

Before we even moved into the new design, there were assumptions that could be tested on the current experience. This helped us iteratively optimise conversions early on, and gain learnings and confidence in the new elements for the redesign.

1. Button copy changed from Enrol to Enrol now

2. Giving the option to book a consultation with a student advisor

3. Adding a section for FAQs

Design stage: 30%

During the time that A/B tests were conducted for optimising the current experience, I worked on design concepts based on design workshop outcomes and UX research. The engineers were doing a tech spike to move the subject pages from Sitecore, and started building a working prototype based on the lo-fi designs, so that we could validate it with users.

Validate

The prototype pulled in existing subject data, which made it easy for me to test the content as well as the design with users. I recruited Open Universities students to gain feedback.

💡 Key learnings:

• Insights from the user testing validated the desirability of key information on the page

• Information about Open Access and Pathways sparked interest, signalling an opportunity to better highlight these details.

• In line with the card sorting results, stats about what students did next was poorly received. The recommendation from the research was to remove this.

Design stage: 60%

Once we validated the lofi designs, I progressed by applying design style guide. Working with the Business Analyst. we mapped out various scenarios that required design. We regularly showcased the progress to stakeholders, while getting continuous feedback from users and advisors.

💡 Key learnings:

• Entry requirements was the most complex section, and we took the opportunity to make improvements which were missing from the current experience. Unlike most sections which could be shifted like-for-like, Entry Requirements was high in importance to users so it was a priority to address issues early on.

• Feedback from student advisors was very valuable, as they are the ones who speak to students on a daily basis and could identify issues that the product team would have missed.

Design stage: 90%

At this stage, there were minor changes only and the design is confirmed for the purpose of the experiment. Other remaining design work were for scenarios relating to continuing students, which was excluded at this stage.

🚀 EXPERIMENT & LAUNCH

A/B test results

• More clicks on Enrol now +7.64%

• More saves to favourite +51.05%

• More leads generated +14.28%

• Reduced bounce rate

Year-on-year comparison

• +35% uplift in overall leads

• +44% uplift in New Known Prospect conversions

Next steps

• Incremental updates were prioritised.

• Working with other product teams to accomodate scenarios of continuing students.

• Through continuous discovery, keep finding opportunities to optimise the experience.

• This project enabled us to scale and follow a similar approach for other types of Product Detail Pages on the website.