Living Off-Campus
Website Design
Client
University of Warwick
My Role
UX Design Lead, Product Owner
Team
Research, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Data
Timeline
October 2023 - September 2024
Tools
Figma, Miro, Microsoft Suite
The Background
Moving off-campus is in right now.
The University of Warwick is a world-renowned and diverse institution, home to over 29,000 students. For decades, a shared popular student experience for Warwick students has been to eventually move to live off-campus for an academic year in their student journey*.
*In 2023/24, ~15,500 UoW students sought private accommodation in the Warwick District, with the numbers increasing by ~2% each year.
The Problem
There's too much scattered information.
There are numerous University of Warwick websites that have been made over the years that provide ad-hoc information relevant to students who would like to live off-campus.
However there is too much information in many different places that students over the years have become lost on where to find the specific information they need to prepare.
The Solution
Pull it all into one place.
This problem presented an opportunity to centralise all essential information into a single, user-focussed website.
By mapping the entire student journey of living off-campus, the website solution provides a streamlined, intuitive experience that helps students access relevant information efficiently — reducing stress and confusion for students, and increasing student engagement with existing Warwick-owned support resources for the business.
What I Accomplished
Sticking everybody together.
I led the project as the UX Design Lead and Product Owner. I formed a working group with representatives from marketing, product, sales, engineering, data science, and various student experts. We met every two weeks to ensure the product met both business and user needs, and to share insight and ideas so we could all learn from each other.
I steered the day-to-day progress of the project within the UX team, prioritising design decisions over others based on user and stakeholder feedback, and other project constraints (i.e. time and resources).
I also regularly hosted design workshops and presentations for our team to showcase the work of my fellow designers to the working group. This helped them gain confidence in their design decisions and encouraged more collaboration, leading to great ideas —some of which were validated in the final product
You can read more about the business impact of the project, constraints 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 Process to keep the product’s design data-informed on user insights.When working within our cross-functional team of product, marketing, regional, engineers, and other experts, I used the Kanban Agile Methodology and a full scale Gantt Chart to keep track of the entire project, and ensure our deliverables hit key deadlines.
