Torrens Uni | Elevating brand UX through personalisation
- Laura Smith
- May 18, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Activating & scaling personalisation across the Torren's digital user experience. Following successful delivery and year-on-year uplift in website performance, a case study was presented alongside the client at the CX Summit NSW 2023.
Project: Torrens University
My Role: Senior UX Designer
Expertise: Research, Design, Strategy, Workshop Facilitation, Personalisation, Analytics & CRO
Overview
Torrens University's recent transition to the DXP platform Sitecore, known for its personalisation capabilities, were on a mission to create a delightful and personalised experience for users across their site. To ensure the foundation was in place to implement a strategy for personalisation, any gaps in the website performance and overall user experience first needed to be identified and addressed.
Year One Results
My Impact
As the primary UX Designer, I lead on all design initiatives within the project team, from strategy development, through to research, ideation, design and dev handover. As part of this highly collaborative team, we leveraged user research & analytics to identify the areas of opportunity to enhance and optimise the user experience across the Torrens website.
Planned & facilitated 3 major workshop series, including sessions with client stakeholder groups and internal sessions with stakeholders from Resolution Digital.
Lead the end to end design process, from research through to development handover of designs, including completion of design documentation, QA & feedback to the dev team.
Planned & implemented a site-wide audit with a cross-team of expertise to deliver the 2021-22 strategy & roadmap; I then lead the presentation of this roadmap to the client.
Presented and gathered feedback for all UX Design deliverables to the client stakeholder team, including research findings, design proposals, workshop outcomes, results and more.
Prepared and presented a case study of the project to an audience of a. 200ppl at the CX Summit Sydney; this was presented alongside the Head of Martech at RD and the Head of Marketing from Torrens University.
Leading Design Workshops As lead designer on this project, one of my key contributions has been to successfully facilitate a number of design workshops, with both internal and external stakeholders, to deliver business outcomes. My strong communication & presentation skills were essential to help determine the strategy and deliver against it, regularly presenting design proposals and reporting progress back to the client.
Project Overview
The primary goal for Torrens University Global Education Services is to achieve significant revenue growth by 2026, continue to grow ahead of it's peers and lead technology advancements in the education industry.
To achieve this, they have embarked on a strategy to create an optimal channel mix supported by leading technology to promote TGES to prospective students and ensure strong customer acquisition.
Hence the brand's transition to the DXP platform, Sitecore, migrating from their former Wordpress template-style site, to activate, enable and scale personalisation across the digital UX of the new branded website.
Following the migration to Sitecore, there were quite a number of complex challenges and despite many of these being expected, they were having a significant impact on the overall site performance and ROI.
Resolution Digital were brought on as an agency partner to determine areas of opportunity and to optimise for best-in-class site performance. Objectives
Quite simply, drive enrolments through the online application conversion funnel.
Torrens University had a big goal of achieving 10% YoY growth in new student enrolments.
More specifically, to drive:
Online application completion
Course guide download completion
Online enquiry submission
Effectively implementing this strategy, particularly the short term initiatives identified from the site-wide audit, lead to achieving some big results and to the client to meeting their FY2021 targets, predominantly their YoY growth target for new student enrolments.
Process
To effectively gauge all areas where our team could look to optimise performance and accelerate ROI, we completed a site wide audit, carried out by our cross-functional-team, including UX/ UI Design, CRO and Tech, to build out a comprehensive roadmap of opportunities and initiatives.
The existing user experience of the website was examined to identify the opportunities where this site foundation could be enhanced, setting the foundation to activate & scale personalisation initiatives.
This approach was highly effective in determining a clear strategy and a roadmap that delivered on big impact opportunities for the short-term, so that larger initiatives could then be addressed to deliver incremental results in the mid to longer term for Torrens.
My role at this stage focused on leading the site wide audit, steering the collaborative efforts across the internal teams, to collate all research & insights and deliver the 2021-22 roadmap with proposed initiatives.
The outcome of the site-wide audit was over 100 initiatives were identified. The findings from the audit were presented to the client, with all initiatives falling into one of eight areas, such as:
Key user flow enhancements
key pages & component redesign
Initial personalisation opportunities
The big impact opportunities were prioritised for the short-term roadmap, which could achieve immediate results for Torrens. I collated these big impact opportunities and implemented into the site by redesigning/ altering the existing page designs using Figma.
The results proved this approach to be very effective, particularly the short-term strategy, to solve the major post-migration challenges and accelerate ROI, to help Torrens University hit their 2021 targets.
As mentioned, we saw a +43% uplift in online application submissions and a +25% increase of downloads of course brochures in the first year.
Mid-long Term Strategy
Prioritising the high impact opportunities in the short term setup a strong foundation in the DXP performance and allowed the team to push ahead with the longer term strategy, operationalising CRO testing initiatives and activating initial personalisation efforts across the site.
For all planned test initiatives, I prepared the design screens, with testing efforts focused on determining optimal solutions for an enhanced user flow through the key conversion funnels across the site.
Example One: Test a new page layout/ enhancements
It was found that the Tuition Fee page had an overall poor UI including a lack of visual & content hierarchy, poor use of grid, low readability & lack of internal linking to supporting CTA's.
At a key point in the decision making journey, this page could either help or hinder the user's flow through to conversion. Insights from the audit however found that over 40% of users were exiting the site from this page.
Live A/B test results determined that these enhancements were very effective in improving the overall UX of this page, achieving significant uplift in user flow through to conversion.
Example One Results
+255% Increase to course guide download (CR), increase from 0.63% to 2.24% CR
+34% Increase to online application (CR)
+9.5% Increase to online enquiry (CR)
Example Two: Test new components across the site
It was found that for the Course Category page, where all courses for a particular category are listed, that less than 20% of users were scrolling to the lower half of this page.
This is an important page of the Torrens website and as part of the user's journey to search, compare and make a decision on a course.
User testing & insights found that such a long page with a stacked list of courses created an overwhelming experience in making a decision and taking the next step to select a course.
This initiative was effective in deterring users from dropping off at this point in the conversion funnel and improving the overall user experience.
Example Two Results
+23% increase to online enquiry (CR)
+16% increase to online application (CR)
+9% increase to course guide download (CR)
My role was to prepare all designs that were prioritised for live testing on the site, ensuring test initiatives were informed with user research and considered UX best practices.
We were therefore able to improve the overall user experience whilst also achieving CRO and business objectives. Designing for Personalisation
As we entered the second year of this project, we'd achieved a strong foundation in the site performance and with results well on track, focus shifted to the long-term roadmap initiatives, particularly scaling designs for personalisation across the site.
Whilst the initial strategy and roadmap set the path to enabling and activating initial personalisation initiatives, to accelerate these efforts and implement more advanced designs, a dedicated roadmap was required.
Therefore, a multi-team workshop was proposed, which I planned and facilitated in person and that was highly effective in delivering an extensive list of initiatives, which all internal stakeholders (UX Design, CRO, Martech, Web Dev) had contributed to.
Objectives and activities of the workshop included:
Discovery & feedback: an expert interview approach was used to allow each internal stakeholder to share their expert insights, learnings & feedback whilst other group members took notes. This setup a foundation of info and focus areas for the following activities.
Evolving personas with real data: the second activity examined and finessed existing personas with user data; analytics and profile data from the Torrens DXP platform was leveraged to build out current user flows for each of the eight user personas.
Ideation of solutions: in the final activity, each of the personas and their mapped user flow across the Torrens site were drawn up on large paper pads. For each touchpoint on the website, assigned participants ideated potential ways to personalise this digital experience.
The outcome of this workshop was an extensive list of over 65+ personalisation initiatives, which were classified into groups by impact vs. effort. These initiatives created the 2022-23 personalisation roadmap and would be implemented over the following 12 month period.
Year Two Results
+55% course guide form submits (CR)
+86% contact us form submits (CR)
+19% application form submits (CR)
What's next
At the time of finishing up as the primary designer on this project, the focus continued on more advanced and journey-based personalisation initiatives, incremental enhancements of key user flows through a design-test-iterate approach and continued scaling out of the design system across all pages of the website.
CX Summit Presentation 2023
At the CX Summit NSW, I had the opportunity to present a case study covering some of the work completed for Torrens University, presented alongside the Head of Marketing from Torrens University and Resolution Digital's Head of Martech.
Challenges & Learnings
The highly collaborative approach of this project meant that we were able to produce deep insights, high quality work and strong results for the client. In order to remain on track however, required the right leadership & steering, together with clear objectives and adhering to strict timelines.
My skills in communication, planning and leadership proved highly effective to maintain a high level of collaboration and contributed to achieving the right outcomes.
Workshops were very effective to quickly and efficiently drive collaborative efforts with multiple stakeholders, for both the internal project team and with the client stakeholders. Where the client experienced challenges to provide timely sign-off of major design proposals, the workshop approach created a solution, gathering stakeholder input early on in the process for a fast-tracked approval process.
My skills in workshop planning and facilitation proved highly effective to run outcome driven sessions and deliver results for the client.
For any questions regarding this project or any of my other work, please do not hesitate to get in contact.
