Outreach website redesign

The challenge

The University of Bristol’s Admissions team needed to promote Outreach activities in order to encourage more applications from school students of underrepresented backgrounds and reach application targets. However, the Outreach website is a disjointed section of the prospective student user journey and has not had a content revision nor redesign in several years. Moreover, we were missing user insight to improve the overall user experience of this website. This would be the first “website section” to use components from our new design system. 

Team

UX designer (me), UX researcher, UI designer, Content designer, Product manager, Delivery manager, Admissions team (stakeholders)

Responsibilities

User research strategy, problem framing, conducting un/moderated research, workshop facilitation, stakeholder management

Duration

2 months (2024)

“Exploring the wild, wild west”

Our stakeholders suggested that teachers were the primary user group, citing that they enable students to apply to university, particularly children who are first in their family to attend university or have extenuating circumstances. School students were secondary users. Due to time constraints, we started by focusing on school teachers.

A significant challenge was that there was no user insight prior to this project. Our team called this challenge “the wild, wild west” - not much data to work with initially, but lots of opportunities to set UX foundations. Thus, one of the outcomes of this project was to equip the Admissions team with a holistic set of user insights about teachers interacting with their online services.

To do so, a mix of quantitative, qualitative, generative, and validation methods were planned. 

The preliminary research goal became: we want to know how teachers and counselors enable students to apply to University so that we can redesign the Outreach pages that support their work.

(Spoilers: this research goal was later scrapped to get to the real problem!)

How are users behaving on the website?

With a Content Designer, we dove into the analytics of the current Outreach pages using Looker Studio. This was done to learn more about existing user behavior of the past 12 months. On the most viewed pages, we also used Heatmaps to better understand how users were interacting with the content. Some key findings included:

• 7 out of the 10 most high traffic pages were Summer school programmes, or “Post-16 activities”.

• Very low traffic to teachers pages and documents than expected

The low traffic to webpages and documents targeted at teachers made me speculate about whether teachers were in fact the primary users of this Outreach website. 

Our competitors are doing things differently

The UX team conducted a competitor analysis of our top five direct competitors. 

Taking directions from the quantitative study, the objectives were 1) to see how our competitors designed for their Outreach website, 2) comparing user journeys of finding “post-16 activities”, and 3) their use of terminology. 

In this analysis, key findings included:

• Use of the term “Outreach” was more popular than “Widening Participation” to describe this admissions process

• Outreach resources and activities were brought closer to the typical application user journey; instead of keeping Outreach content distinctly separate in another section (decentralised), users can find content about Post-16 activities, “contextual” and “guaranteed” offers directly on the course pages themselves

• A couple competitors offered an “eligibility tool” feature, an interactive quiz to help school students see what Outreach offerings they’re eligible for

It became clear that other universities designed Outreach webpages with students in mind as their primary user - contrary to our own priorities.

Reconsidering the primary user

During our internal SME focus groups, we learned that programme managers work closely with school teachers through emails, mailing lists, and phone calls. They seldom link them through to the Outreach website. 

This partly explains why the teacher pages on the Outreach website were getting low traffic - teachers were not depending on the website for admissions information!

We made a call to pivot our focus onto school students, challenging our stakeholders to reconsider who the primary users of the Outreach website are.

We quickly revised our research plan and decided to interview Outreach ambassador students to prove our point: school students from underrepresented backgrounds are more likely to depend on our Outreach website than school teachers are. 

Mapping out mental models

To assess how our users associate and group Outreach topics, we conducted an open unmoderated card sorting activity. We collected keywords and topics using what we learned from the analytics report and our SME interviews. This was distributed to teachers as well as our Outreach student ambassadors (50-50 makeup in total responses).

The dendrogram gave us valuable insight into how we might group the pages in the redesign. 

Listening in

Interviews were organised with six Outreach student ambassadors. The research goal was to learn what students from underrepresented backgrounds value when browsing universities so that we can redesign the Outreach pages that enable them to apply confidently.

The interviews were done remotely over MS Teams. A script was designed to cover the following objectives:

• Understand how they browse universities to apply to

• Identify what information and content they look for when browsing

• Understand the barriers that they face when applying to universities

• Understand how they decide which universities to attend

• Evaluate the content hierarchy and navigation of the redesigned Outreach page

Key learnings that were majority sentiments included:

Needs:

• I need to find ways that I can strengthen my uni application to make sure that I get into university

• I need to do well in my exams to get the grades that I need for university

• I need to get funding so that I can go to uni and not go broke

Using this discovery phase, the learnings were turned to multiple outputs to humanise the design process and prioritise our solutions.

Reflections

• Pivoting our focus from teachers to school students in the middle of our discovery phase was both valuable and stressful. In hindsight, had we scheduled the internal SME focus groups as the first research activity, we might have learned about the teachers’ preferred ways of working earlier and avoid wasting time creating a research plan revolved around them. However, we still managed to turn the research plan around in part due to insights in the analytics and competitor analysis.

• We learned from the competitor analysis that some universities implemented an “Eligibility questionnaire”. Applicants can input their living situations, care status, and study interests to see whether they qualify for a contextual offer and/or are eligible for Summer programmes. Our interviews also revealed that students wanted a more personalised experience. Delivering a questionnaire feature as part of our project was not possible due to time constraints. I would have liked to prototype this feature in the following iteration of this product to explore the desirability and usability with the users. This might alleviate the anxiety from users that they “do not know if they have a chance of getting into uni”.