Project brief
The business school of the University of Cambridge main objective was to appeal to future students by attracting them to their business degree programmes. This included a huge multi webpage redesign and enhancement, landing pages and email templates needed to be reviewed and uplifted to help improve conversion and enhance the customer journey.
What I did
I made design enhancements to 15 webpages to really sell the Cambridge experience and to bring out the unique selling points of the university. This would include interesting stats and stories about the university that would encourage students to want to enrol on their business degree programmes. The challenge was to be bold and stand out whilst remianing on brand to really push the experience of the university.
UX Discovery phase
The website was very outdated in its appearance. The user interface and the general treatment of content and call-to-actions were not very good. The website did not reflect what potential customers would expect from a leading Business School. The Cambridge experience was being lost, it did not show it’s difference and identity as a leading business school. In addition to this, there were other universities, some I identified in the London area that had better ways of showcasing their uniqueness and identity as a university. You can see below where I have circled some of the problem areas. Their were issues with their current navigation design. The page appears very busy and underwhelming at the same time. The page hierarchy was an area that also would need to be improved so potential students and customers know where to go intuitively to find important information. There is no clear hierarchy and page structure.
UX Design
The original Cambridge Juge website had some great videos, stats and interesting facts about the university which I wanted to highlight. However, all of this was being lost on many of the pages. The website had many user experience issues: Primary and Secondary call to actions were not being fully utilised to their maximum capacity. There was an overwhelming amount of information but this was not being presented concisely on the page. More importantly, there were limited use of headines – so I suggested these changes to the client.
After highlighting some of the issues with the client, I started mocking up design solutions for each page. Below is an example comparison between the original projects page and the redesigned one.
Landing page designs
Landing page brief
The primary objective of the landing page was to gather leads and maximise conversion rates. The client wanted it to be visually striking and modern looking to grab attention of visitors. It would have a similar look and feel to the new multi page website.
Wireframe stage
In order to best communicate the vision I had for the landing page a wireframe was created to show important elements where primary and secondary call to actions would be placed on the page.
High fidelity mockup
I created a high fidelity mockup of what the landing page would look like and made annotations for the client to understand how the value proposition and core benefits would look like on the page. This helped the client understand and visualise what would help make their future landing pages drive more conversions.
I created a design that would instantly highlight the key benefits and incentives above the fold, that visitors can see before submitting their information.
Identifying UX pitfalls
Areas of concern for the client. They were the oldest of all the top 30 business school rankings and was basic in comparison. Cambridge Judge have a great reputation but the website didn’t reflect or showcase it’s uniqueness and what made them stand out as a leading university. There were some elements of the design I could reuse but more importantly re-design to help highlight and draw more visual interest into important parts of the page. The hero section on some of the pages needed a huge uplift to draw more excitement and into these pages.
Webpages redesigned
Below are a series of webpages that were redesigned for the client. I made better use of space so that sections look more coherant and are easier to scan and highlighted key pieces of information that students were interested in.