Academy Xi offers short, practical courses for individual up-skilling and corporate capability enhancement in design, innovation, and digital transformation.
MY ROLE
UX Research, UX Design, UI Design
SUMMARY
Working in a UX team, I helped understand the needs
of both students and staff and prioritise main features to
re-develop Academy Xi's website.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
As the business has grown, new courses and formats have been developed, the UX of the Academy Xi’s website has not kept pace with user behaviour and expectations. Academy Xi aims to expand their portfolio through the redevelopment of the website, which needs to be end-user focus, as a touchpoint that connects the organisation with potential and existing students.
PROJECT GOALS
To develop recommendations on how to best approach the rebuild of the site, focusing on:
1. How user can easily access course content
2. Format select
3. Submitting enquiries
RESEARCH METHODS
THE DISCOVERY
The research phase allowed us to review competitor landscape and understand our stakeholder and students vision, specifically user needs, behaviours and pain-points. The insights helped redefined external and internal facing business goals.
core student needs
1. Present clearer and relevant information in the audience's language
2. Deliver content specific to locations
3. Reflect the Academy Xi brand through showcasing the sense of community
core staff needs
1. Reflect achieve market recognition for student outcomes
2. Create efficient and seamless backend process
3. Achieve internal organisational alignment
PERSONA
Following the interviews, the synthesis from the findings and were able to create two primary types of personas.
student personas
staff personas
IDEATION
From the research, the findings led to creating customer journey and personas that helped formulate a great foundation to move into feature ideation and prioritisation. The main focus are:
1. The Academy Xi tone of voice needs to resonate with the audience.
2. Quiz me feature allows potential students to assess their own suitability to courses offered by Academy Xi.
3. Compare courses feature provides a quick overview of content at a superficial level that allows potential students to understand disciplines in which course is suitable.
4. Easy access and viewing information about courses
Easy access and viewing information in one place is ideal. Comparison table will clear metrics such as price, opportunities/outcomes, depth of content and duration.
5. Interactive elements
Potential students need to connect with the website in an interactive way and feel approachable, such as rich media, drag and drop.6. From course to career
Potential students want to know how the course will help their career prospects, hence videos of career stories and case studies from alumni are very engaging content.
PROTOTYPE
Clickable prototype created in Adobe XD for usability testing.
compare courses
This feature gives a quick overview of which courses to choose.
interactive elements
As opposed to text, interactive elements such as rich media, drag and drop is more engaging.
quiz me
Discover your perfect course quiz helps potential student to assess which course is most suitable.
LEARNING
Despite the close collaboration between ideation and prototype, there could have been more conversations on dividing work and teams. There were a lot of double-ups in working on wireframes and prototypes which resulted in inadequate time for refining designs for usability testing.