Hennepin Technical College
Is a public college located in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Area, with an enrollment of 5,582 undergraduate students.
My role
I worked on multiple HTC traffic-efficiency projects as a UX/UI Designer, which consisted of continuous improvements on the user journey through the website. For this project I performed a market research, user testings, and tracked posterior results with the traffic analysis team.
Background
The first problem our design team faced was a high bounce rate (aprox. 72%), along with an unsatisfactory conversion rate of course applications on the website. Since the UX/UI Desing team had been recently created at HTC we had several chalenges to overcome, the most important of them being the organization of all activities and deliveries. For this reason, we decided to use the MVP process for this particular project. This way, we would be able to deliver an initial solution that could bring us valuable results, while still working on further improvements.
Understanding the problem
HTC knew the problem they were facing but didn’t know how to approach it. The first challenge was to fully understand the strategy we offered and work out how to apply it as a team. Looking at the educational market, the competitive analysis gave us an insight into how other insitution websites approach the future students’ journey for applications. We began to identify our differentiators as well as opportunities highlighted by our competitors’ shortcomings. We focussed on mapping out the current experience and identifying customer pains, goals and risks.
Starting to map
First task was to map the current user journey from the homepage to the application link.
Making a quick user flow analisys, it was easy to identify the lack of CTAs or tracks from the homepage to the application page. Regardless of which path you chose, the journey would be inherently and unnecessarily longer. Other serious issues were also noted, such as the fact that there were multiple essential pages with virtually the same information/content. But the main problem we identified on the homepage was the Menu bar, which only had a 22% access rate and was the only entryway to many key pages and forms.
Through constant and iterative refinements of the original user flow, we developed a new format that gave a higher purpose to the pre-fold of the homepage, especially the header and now horizontal menu. The idea was to maintain the buttons that contained options to direct the user straigh to the application page. In all other scenarios, we established that the application page should not be more than one page away from the homepage, or two clicks.
Ideation & Prototype
Outlining the user journey allowed us to be UI design agnostic. We didn’t have to make strongly opinionated design decisions and could move into building the page templates in a faster pace. Looking at the current UI design structure, some important sections of the menu bar were extremelly hidden. I made a prototype for a horizontal menu bar placed as base for the HTC logo. A carrousel was added to introduce more content at a lower scroll-rate, as it was determined early on by HTC’s marketing team that most users wouldn’t scroll past 1/3rd of the homepage.
This first wireframe I made was discussed by our marketing and web development team and after some meetings we decided to move on and initiate an interactive prototype. As mentioned before, my task was to redesign the first 2/3rds of the homepage, since all main interactions related to our traffic optimization strategy were placed there, leaving the last third as a hub for college communications and services.
User Testing
The User Testings took place in August of 2017, and had as main objective to validate the usability of the new homepage, making it as easy, fast and intuitive as possible for the user to reach the online application page.
Results
The User Testing results were better than expected, not only for having an excellent final grade but most importantly for giving us crucial points of improvement. Three of five users mentioned they would consider it necessary to learn more about HTC before going to the online application page. We reassessed the Kanban we created at the beginning of the project to understand what were our points of success (green), and what were issues that would still need to be tackled in future assessments (red).
In February of 2018, we had a feedback session with the marketing and traffic analytics team. Comparing the previous February, online applications increased by 34% that year. Also, the bounce rate was decreased to 55%! We were then assigned our next challenge: a fully interactive and responsive chatbot; as previous test results proved that FAQs and content components were vital to online conversion.
