Choice Centres Project
Website redesign for INTO University Partnerships' most complex product - the 'Choice Centre' - a further education institution providing students with dozens of study options in the UK.
Year
2021
Client
INTO University Partnerships
Project overview
This project focused on designing a dedicated digital experience to raise awareness and improve understanding of INTO Choice Centres — specialized locations offering flexible study options for international students.
The primary goals were to clearly communicate the benefits of Choice Centres, enable users to search and filter available courses, and ultimately increase enquiries and applications. My role involved shaping the content strategy, structuring the user journey, and designing an intuitive interface that made it easy for users to explore, understand, and take action.
My Role
As the UX lead on this project, I was responsible for:
defining the information architecture to create an intuitive navigation and clear content structure
informing the content strategy using user insights
mapping the user journeys and flows
designing and delivering wireframes for a mobile-first design
gathering stakeholder feedback to refine and optimise the user experience
collaborating with the content, marketing, and dev teams to align our UX goals with business needs
Tools used
Figma, Miro, Google Analytics, Contentful, MS Office
Behind the scenes
Diagram showing user journey through the proposed new pages
Low-fidelity wireframe showing search and filtering tool on mobile
Low-fi and high-fi wireframes of the new pages
Challenges
Budget/time constraints
Unfortunately there was no time or budget allocated for any user research before we started designing, due to a planned larger project taking place later in the year.
Limited resources
Choice Centres are a complex proposition and there was very little content available to work with. The content team were under-resourced and couldn't product any content until just before the page(s) launched, so we were designing in the dark.
Lack of evidence
As the request came from stakeholder opinion, we had little evidence to guide us on what the user questions and requirements would be for this project.
Multiple target audiences
Producing a design that worked for two distinctly different audiences - prospective international students and education counsellors.
Building before design
The widget that would collate the search results for Choice Centre courses was being developed as we were working on the design of the page that it would live on. We hadn't had a chance to work out basic user flows before the build started.
Approach
Without the time to conduct any qualitative or quantitative user research, we began by gathering requirements from stakeholders and performing a cognitive walkthrough and content audit on the existing webpages.
This allowed us to:
gain insight into the perceived problems with the proposition
understand the business needs for the redesign
discover how disjointed and confusing the existing user journey for Choice Centre students could be
uncover some fairly large content gaps
We decided the best way to proceed was for my colleague and I to work on some initial low-fi wireframes in parallel for the Choice landing page and Centre subpages, then gather feedback before iteration.
Solutions
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To solve this issue, we designed a new landing page which:
clearly explained the difference was between Choice Centres and other types of INTO Centre
outlined the benefits of studying at a Choice Centre
showed the locations of the different Choice Centres
provided links through to subpages detailing the unique features of each Centre
showed the available course options when studying at a Choice Centre (accommodated the new course search widget that was being developed)
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We took this opportunity to draw up a design for an alternative, mobile-first Choice course finder tool, with more filters to help users narrow down their search.
I proposed that having it sit as a separate entity with its own results page would prevent the results from becoming unwieldy and affecting the page load speed, which the existing widget was doing.
Outcome
Following the launch of the new webpages, I recommended we conduct some usability testing to check user flows and get a better understanding of user needs and questions. We were informed that no budget had been allocated for user research during design or post-launch for this part of the wider Choice redesign project.
I reiterated the importance of user research in user-centred design and that when budget became available, the team should test the course search widget to gather evidence of any usability issues on mobile. I also suggested we create a basic prototype for our alternative course finder tool and test this at the same time.
The impact of our work was that we improved the visibility and profile of Choice Centres on both the INTOStudy.com and Partner Portal websites. Unfortunately post-launch, the development team was redirected to a new project, so further usability testing didn't take place and our new course search tool design was shelved.