Ignite your institution’s success with the power of personalized experiences! In a world where users crave seamless interactions and tailored solutions, institutions can’t afford to fall behind. By embracing exceptional experience design, you’ll captivate users, create lasting connections, and outshine the competition. Use this journey map to optimize your digital platform so that it provides a better user experience for prospective students, current students, parents and alumni, and meets your business needs.
Know Your Audience’s Preferences and Needs
You most likely have more than one audience: prospective students, current students, parents, and alumni – and they interact differently. Apply user research methods, such as user interviews of each audience to gather qualitative data about their preferences, tasks they need to complete, and how they want to engage with you online. Utilizing user research methods provides valuable insights for optimizing online experiences, aligning with user expectations, and improving audience engagement.
Define Your Content Strategy
Inconsistent and outdated content can misrepresent the vision and values of your institution and create the wrong impression with your audience. Perform a content audit to ensure it aligns with your outlook, and identify duplicate, contradictory or incomplete information. Implement a strategy on what content will be revised or developed, and where targeted content can be leveraged to provide a more dynamic and personalized experience.
Accommodate Multiple Means of Navigating a Site
Users can often get lost and frustrated on their journey across the platform, unable to find what they need or get back to where they were. Design for three modes of discovery – surgical, a user knows what they want; casual – a user relies on your system’s content hierarchy to surface relevant information; and assist – a user needs guidance on where to find information. Designing your platform this way will improve user satisfaction, streamline information retrieval, and increase overall engagement with the system’s content.
Nurture Students Through Their Entire Lifecycle
A user’s objectives and needs can change over time. Document the current student journey and identify ways to personalize and optimize it, from recruitment to alumni. Actively seek user feedback to gather insights into their experiences and identify potential issues and areas for improvement. Optimizing and personalizing the student journey improves outcomes, enhances student experiences, and fosters stronger relationships between institutions and their students.
Create Profile Scripts
Today’s user expects that any messaging they receive is targeted to their needs. Utilize analytics and include additional quantitative data gathered through research to create user groups for targeted messaging and automation. This will help deliver the right message, at the right time, on multiple channels.
Perform an Accessibility Assessment
Inadequate website accessibility can exclude users with impairments, leading to a diminished user experience. Review your website to ensure that it meets the needs of all users (with and without impairments), test with real users, and iterate to improve the experience to ensure WCAG compliance.
Plan to Maintain
No matter the scale, every system requires maintenance, which can be very time consuming with hundreds of pieces of content at various stages of obsolescence. Develop your content management system so it requires minimal resources to maintain content and enable it to run successfully. Incorporate areas where analytics and user behavior data may be used to automate tasks.
Creating a user experience that meets your audience’s expectations requires significant time and effort. Involving Experience Design professionals can accelerate the development of user-centered experiences and can leapfrog your current platform into one that meets the expectations of the modern user.
Orion’s award-winning Experience Design team can partner with you to reimagine a more intuitive, human-centered and accessible experience. Learn about Orion’s Experience Design services.
XD Director Sophia Latto has contributed in a wide range of fields, from publishing, advertising and web to product design, in industries including financial services, utilities, technology, and nonprofit. Sophia has also served as an adjunct instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), a State University of NY.
