From discovery we identified the audience for this section (for more information about the process read the discovery case study)

• Prospective students (mostly undergraduate students, as post-graduate students are likely to talk to university staff members in person as they already have a relationship with the university)
• Other audiences: Supporters and influencers (parents, high school teachers, career advisors, university student advisors)

Old journeys

To understand further what was working and wasn’t working, using the old website, I mapped out all the steps a user needed to take to achieve their goal. This was also a helpful way to explain to stakeholders what wasn’t working so they were on board with the changes I proposed later.

My key take-away was that way finding between pages was a big issue, making the process confusing and frustrating.

Opportunities

Moving into the design phase I proposed some solutions to the question: How might we help prospective students to find a study option that’s right for them so that they can enrol to study at the University of Waikato?

• Create a clear way finding strategy to improve the flow of pages and make navigating between pages easier
• Provide multiple pathways for people to access information
• Group subjects based on how future students think about subjects (not how the university is structured)
  

Before I designed any of the page templates, it was important to figure out the flow between pages, and where each piece of information should live. To do this, I needed to create a proposed flow of information. I began by defining the goals (from the universities perspective).

Goals

The goal of the section is for a potential student to 

• be ready to start the application process,
• have chosen a qualification and a major subject, and
• feel confident about their decision (because they have all the information).
  

The goal of each page is either to

• guide users towards a qualification page, or
• give users more information to help them decide if the qualification or subject is right for them.
  

Scenarios

Starting with a series of common scenarios, I mapped out the proposed page flow. Potential students start their journeys in many different ways. They exist on a spectrum from ‘I know what’ I want to ‘I have no idea’.

• I’m interested in a specific qualification and I know it’s name
• There is a specific subject I’m interested in
• I want to browse qualifications
• I’ve been linked from a campaign (Start from the specific study area page)
• I don’t know where to start

Updated journeys

Spending time creating the proposed user journeys meant that when I was designing the pages, I was able to make sure that it was intuitive to navigate between the pages in the flow.

The study options section section consisted of 7 different page templates. The qualification page is arguably the most important page in the section.

Purpose of this page

The purpose of this page is to be a central hub for all information about the qualification. It should provide access to all information a prospective student might need to make a decision about whether the qualification is right for them. This includes content, way finding and contact information.

Wire framing was really important

I went through an extensive wire framing process. Beginning with very low fidelity wireframes, identifying sections of content, moving onto much more detailed concepts. At each point in the process I presented my work to gather feedback from stakeholders. We also tested the designs with students.

Challenges

• So much content to display
• Content comes from different places
• Some qualifications had more or less content
• How to display content that changes depending on options selected within the page
  

The content from these pages came from different sources including:

• API data (e.g. name of the qualification, dates, locations etc.)
• Content pulled from another page in the website (e.g. a summary, image etc.)
• Manually loaded content for that specific page in the website

This added a layer of complexity to the page design,  as I needed to figure out where all the information was coming from, and in what format, as that influenced what I was able to do with the page layout.

Questions

• How can we create a central hub for all information about a qualification?
• How can we provide a flexible system that can be adapted for a range of unique qualification types?
• How can we combine different content sources (API’s driven content, content from other pages on the website and content that’s authored per page?