International Student Support Website Redesign

Client

University of Warwick

My Role

Product Designer

Team

Immigration, Research, Product, Engineering

Timeline

July 2023 - October 2023

Tools

Figma, Miro, Microsoft Suite

The Background

International students make 1/3 of Warwick's student population.

The University of Warwick is a world-leading university which has attracted over 29,000 students, of which 9,500 are international students from 147 countries. As a result of this vibrant international community, the university thrives on inclusivity and a celebration of culture.

This reflects Warwick's dedication to supporting their international student community from the moment they choose to study at Warwick. This includes supporting the legal and financial processes of arriving and living in the UK, life during their studies, and beyond graduation as they embark on their next steps.

The Problem

International students struggle to find relevant support.

For many international students, adjusting to studying in the UK is complicated and daunting: from understanding visa requirements needed to study in the UK, settling into their new environment, and figuring out how to access ongoing tailored support throughout their studies.

There are already a lot of Warwick website resources available across different departments to help international students for isolated scenarios. But amid the overload of isolated support resources, international students struggle to find relevant support information that they're looking for.

Scope & Constraints

The Immigration & Compliance department sought help from the product design team.

Scope:

The product design project focussed on redesigning the existing international student support website to better simplify information about the financial, living and legal processes of moving to the UK.
The redesign aims to provide an end-to-end student living guide tailored to the needs of international students to facilitate their transition and integration into the UK.

Constraints:

The project had a strict deadline for launch (before November) to support the large influx of international students arriving in the UK at that time.
As a result, the project was allotted 3 months for ideation, testing, development and launch.

The Solution

A searchable guide with all of the international student need-to-knows.

The International Student Support webpage is now the first webpage international students land on when clicking on the ‘International Students’ section on the ‘Welcome to Warwick’ website. This website is an all-encompassing guide for international students providing key information and advice in the order of their student journey - before they arrive in the UK, and what to do when they get here.

What I Accomplished

Taking full ownership over my work.

I participated in this project within a product design team of 5. I also worked very closely with international student ambassadors (ISAs)

Limited staff worked towards this project as other designers in the student experience department were required to spend more time working on other projects.

I became one of the primary designers on this project, taking full responsibility over ideating, testing and implementing my design solutions.

You can read more about the business impact of the project, and lessons I learned in the Project Review section.

Design & Management Process

Design Thinking and Agile Methodology.

Our UX team focussed on using the Design Thinking Framework to ground all design decisions on international student feedback and insights.Since we were also working on a tight deadline, a lean workflow and prioritisation according to business and user needs was key. I created a Kanban and Gantt Chart with a priority list to manage the progress of our project, and to ensure all of our deliverables hit key deadlines.

Synthesising User Research

Producing vivid research artifacts to sharpen cross-functional teams' focus on the problem.

Foundational research by the international student research team had been done prior to the designers landing on the project. They hired 10 International Student Ambassadors (ISAs) to conduct interview and roundtable research with 102 international students about what their pain-points were when following a process of accessing international support at Warwick.Main takeaway: a lot of international students struggled to understand where to start when preparing to live in the UK.

Using this research, I developed personas and user journey maps that built a vivid story of the problems that the international students faced to stakeholders. Imani and Mattias are two personas brought to life from aggregated empathy maps.

Synthesising User Research

Running usability tests revealed that students feel overwhelmed by walls of hyperlinks.

To understand the errors in the current website in more detail, I conducted a moderated usability study with 8 students to supplement the research team's findings.Study tasks included prompts like asking them to find information about visa support or how to open a bank account in the UK.

The main pain-point during these studies was that each student student spent a significant amount of time (avg. 20 seconds) scanning through long lines of hyperlinks, and due to the Serial Position Effect, they could only remember the first and last hyperlinks in the sequence.

Synthesising User Research

Key takeaways.

Here are the key insights that I synthesised from our research team's findings and the usability study that I conducted.

84%

of students

In the roundtables expressed wanting an illustrated step-by-step process of settling into the UK as a key user need.

78%

of students

In the roundtables shared that they would like more info about UK culture, and how to make the most out of living in the UK.

75%

of students

In my usability study were discouraged from using the current website due to an overwhelm of hyperlinked text.

Design Hypotheses

Collaborating with cross-functional teams to generate HMW statements and design hypotheses based on user data and insights.

I collaborated in the brainstorming session with the Immigration and Compliance team, research, engineering and product team, adding to a Thoughtful Execution tree to generate HMW statements and hypotheses that could solve core problems we synthesised from research.Collaborating cross-functionally was useful to gain a diversity of expertise from each team on business and user needs, and which concepts needed to be prioritised. For example, sharing compulsory information about processes for applying for a student visa was a P1 Priority.

I took ownership over the "Navigating the current website data & insights" branch, designing to relieve international students of navigation problems on the website.

Design Solutions

Qualitative feedback revealed card layouts can help users more easily digest linear information.

I conducted a qualitative workshop with 12 international students to narrow down some of my early ideas on how to replace the walls of hyperlinks that students had flagged as a major pain-point in research. Every student validated the card layout design that I sketched, commenting that the card layouts felt more "visually organised", making it easier to scan and follow chronological information.

Design Solutions

Further usability tests and quick-test surveys showed that international students value search bar navigation.

The Immigration & Compliance team and product team sent out a survey to 50 international students about what they would like to see on the new support website. 42% of students wrote "search" or "search bar" in an open text field, showcasing that over 1/3 of students would try to use a search bar to find relevant information.I also found that 8 out of 12 students used the Warwick search bar feature 3+ times during prompts in a usability study that I conducted 2 weeks later.

Design Solutions & Learnings

Incorporating a search bar did not generate the effect we predicted during mockup tests.

I conducted design research on high-fidelity mockups of the website with 8 more students. Only 2 out of 8 students could find specific task information using the search bar without giving up and trying another method.7 out of 8 students expressed frustration with the search results, often finding them too broad, which led to extended navigation time and additional clicks.

Users still found it frustrating to click through multiple pages to access the right support.

Design Solutions & Learnings

Using user behaviour insights to further investigate another design hypothesis.

Learnings from this design research led me to draw more attention to another branch in our Thoughtful Execution tree that we hadn't explored yet.I explored the idea of nesting as a solution to display a large amount of information without having to leave the page.

Warwick also already had tab and accordion UI elements in their design system, so I sketched using these templates to pitch the idea to stakeholders and users for feedback.

Design Solutions

An accordion with a search bar feature was the magic solution that solved multiple user & business pain-points.

During A/B testing, 75% of international students preferred accordions over tabs, as the linear and collapsible layout allowed them to control how much information they viewed at once. The Immigration & Compliance team also approved the accordion design for its flexibility: accordion sections can be easily rearranged or duplicated, making it simpler for the team to update and manage the information inside for students.

I revisited previous user insights about users valuing search bar navigation. I noticed that frustrations were focussed around users having to leave the page when using the search function. Therefore I hypothesised: would including a search bar focussed within a contained system of information produce the effects we were after? I included a search bar element into the accordion and this worked wonders.

International students now benefit from a contained system of checklist information presented in the order of the international student journey, with a search bar for simpler and quicker navigation.

I partnered closely with fellow designers, management, engineers and our main stakeholders - the Immigration & Compliance team - to design, UX write and develop the final design of the International Student Support website. Below, I've also highlighted a few design hypotheses from our Thoughtful Execution Tree that were validated by users in our final design.

‍You can view the live website here.

Project Review

Accomplishments and Impact

Though the team is still reviewing the performance of our project-post launch for further improvement, here are the website's current outcomes and my impact during the course of the project:

32%

Reduction

In bounce rates after the website redesign.

30%

Reduction

In inquiry emails to the International Support team.

Days early

Website launch, despite very tight time constraints.

Projects

Sprouted out of the international student insights that came from this project.

Project Review

Reflections And Lessons Learned

Learning all about international student life has never been simpler.

International Student Support Website Redesign