Project overview
As one of the top universities in Australia, research students are the supporting pillars to UQ's continued growth and success as a leading research institution.
The aim of this project was to improve the website experience for research students with enhanced flows and targeted content, which helps the business to attract new talents.
Role
My primary role in this project was to uncover pain points and deliver a satisfying solution. There was no UI work involved as we were leveraging existing components.
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Problem
The website experience for research students was inconsistent and lacked a single source of truth, making it challenging for prospective students to gather information comprehensively.
While the look and feel of these pages adhered to the latest One UQ standards, the overall user journey was confusing and disjointed.
Solution
After pinpointing the flaws in user flow and content, I worked closely with stakeholders and content designers to deliver:
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Pages designed/re-designed to enable prospective research students gather information seamlessly
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Meaningful, competitor-aligned content that supports users from awareness to conversion.
Research
Desktop research
I commenced my design process by conducting an initial UX discovery to understand the current user journey of a prospective research student and identify problems that inflicted pain points.
Looking at four of our biggest local and domestic competitors, I quickly realised the stronger players were offering a one-stop experience for prospective research students that UQ had failed to provide.
Users on competitor sites were able to gain a high-level overview of research degrees from one designated landing page, which provided pathways to other important and relevant information.
UQ users on the other hand had to juggle between multiple sites to see the whole picture of its research degree offerings. There was always a missing puzzle piece/information on each site, user experience suffered badly as a consequence.
Stakeholder interviews
After gathering meaningful secondary data from key competitors, it was time to hear from the business. I worked closely with our UX lead to conduct interviews with Graduate School's liaison officers, communication coordinator and senior development manager - a key stakeholder for this project.
I then created an affinity map by grouping findings under common themes and features. I thoroughly enjoyed this process of chuncking information and synthesising qualitative data to extract insights.
Business needs
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Improve the current experience by offering one source of truth, information scattered across multiple pages was not ideal.
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Stakeholders would like the redesign to highlight what sets UQ apart from its key competitors.
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New website needs to be easy to navigate for users and also relatively low maintenance for website owners.
User interviews and usability testing
I created and debriefed testing methodologies and objectives at a high level to the UXR team. Through collaboration, we were able to uncover user's first-hand impression of our sites and extract qualitative insights to inform design decisions.
User needs
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Graduate School landing page performed poorly during testing. Prospective students felt like this page was catered for current students only.
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Higher Degree by Research page in 'UQ Study' was well received by users as it provided useful and relevant information.
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Users would like to know what differentiates UQ from other universities, what are the benefits of pursuing their research degree with UQ.
Ideation
Initial UX solutions
I workshopped with our UX lead, information architect and content writer to discuss initial UX proposals for this project. We studied the existing pages on our website and quickly pin-pointed features and contents that we thought was either valuable or detrimental to the user experience.
Areas of improvement
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Redesign current HDR study page which tested well with users. Migrate any relevant content from other sites, introduce a new page name and URL as part of the redesign.
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Create new pages to fill in content gaps identified from user research and competitor analysis. Emphasise on UQ advantages, highlight reasons why users should research with UQ.
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Uplift admission page to better communicate the process to users. By providing better guidance online, it will help to reduce the volume of student enquiries coming through, which in turn alleviate the workload of the liaison officers.
Design
Mid-fi design
The final design for this project was delivered in mid-fidelity, as all components used were sourced from the existing design system, eliminating the need for high-fidelity designs during handover.
Using mid-fidelity designs in discussions with stakeholders had allowed them to focus on the page's content, which from user research we know was the primary factor behind the subpar experience.
One stop landing page with optimised content
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Highlight program related information at the top of the page. It is paramount for both the business and user to understand what are the research options they can choose from.
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Showcase UQ's competitive advantages as a world famous university with strong research capability.
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Showcase that UQ offers a wide variety of financial and non-financial support to help them accomplish their research goals.
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New pages that bridge content gaps
Why do your graduate research with us page
Stakeholders have expressed the desire to highlight what sets UQ apart from other Go8 competitors.From user research, we also learnt that international students have more things to consider when selecting an university and where they would like to spend the next four years.
How to find a supervisor page
Not providing instructional information on our website has costed supervisors receiving meaningless emails from prospective students on a weekly basis. Whilst this is frustrating for the supervisors, we cannot blame the users if the information was simply not there.
Streamlining the end to end admission flow
A major pain point we have identified from UX discovery and user research was that the admission page for research degrees did not align with other admission pages, steps were not outlined clearly and important links were missing.
In light of this problem, the new design must streamline the process and break it down into steps like other admission pages to meet the expectations of both domestic and international applicants.
I liaised with content writers and Graduate School officers to marry the user experience with content and making sure these pages are supporting users to understand the admission process holistically.
Together, we challenged ourselves to deliver complex information to users in the most intuitive way and construct informative content that fulfils user needs from pre-admission to post-admission.
Design validation
User testing
I laid out the designs in Miro and drafted questions in preparation for a handover to our UXR team. My primary role here was to debrief the researchers on the design changes made and what we would like to validate. A prototype was put together to allow users to explore the new designs in a sequential way.
Overall, the designs were very well received by users. The new pages are effective at helping users to gather information, understand information and absorb information.
"This page covers exactly what I need, layout is also great!"
"All the required documents are nicely listed here. Very clear."
Reflection
This was my first project at UQ, and it provided an exciting opportunity to apply my skills in a real-world context while learning from mentors to deliver a satisfying solution for students.
Due to how convoluted the journeys and flows were laid out in the previous design, it took me some time to fully understand the problem space and pinpoint the core issues. On the flip side, identifying the root problems, presenting them to stakeholders, and fixing them was a truly rewarding process.