Type: Individual project | Client: Alliance Manchester Business School | Timeline: 2021 (2 months) | Role: UX designer
Increasing conversion rates among top-quality candidates for graduate programmes at Alliance Manchester Business School.
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How might we make prospective students feel confident about their career prospects as an AMBS graduate through the business school’s website?
Brief
As part of my university course module in UX Design, I was tasked with a brief by Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS). The client objective was to better understand the friction, pain points, and opportunities across any points in the online application journey to graduate programmes; with the particular aim to increase conversion among top-quality candidates.
Outcome
A 22-page report including the following deliverables:
Heuristic evaluation / Content & analytics audit / User interviews / Persona / Use case scenarios / User journey & experience map / Competitor assessments / Wireframes / Storyboard / Testing framework.
For AMBS to improve the user experience for applicants and increase conversion among top-quality candidates, my proposal was to incorporate alumni stories, industry statements, and careers statistics onto their website. This is presumed to increase the confidence about career prospects as an AMBS graduate, among prospective students, which was a major identified pain point for applying.
Heuristic evaluation
I conducted a heuristic evaluation to overview key user experience elements for successfully meeting AMBS’ objectives. These were deduced from Jakob Nielsen's ten usability heuristics, which provide a validated list of key usability aspects for online user journeys. An estimation of the current state of the AMBS website was determined by ranking the prevalence of each heuristic from 1-5.
Insights were used to narrow the project scope and supplement the validity of findings discovered in further research.
Heuristic evaluation
Content & analytics audit
Given the limited access to direct communication with AMB's personnel to develop a representative persona of the target group, a content and analytics audit of the website and AMBS alumni was conducted. The aim was to explore data about common visitors of the school’s website and alumni profiles and understand the type of profiles the school is targeting through its content.
01
Visitors mostly come from the UK, India, China, and the US
02
AMBS particularly welcomes students from institutions with high ranking and repute
03
AMBS students gravitate towards the consulting and tech industry, at firms like PwC and Amazon
With these insights in mind, the below core characteristics of a persona for the target group of “top-quality candidates” were defined.
These were later used to identify and gather representative candidates for a usability study to better understand how a sample of the persona would interact with AMBS’ website when applying to a masters programme.
01
High academic grades
02
Undergraduate degree from a renowned university
03
Interest in business, consulting,
and/or tech
04
Notable extracurricular
achievements
Usability study
The usability study was conducted with 5 representative users, with an observational approach using a task scenario: finding a masters programme in business, in the, UK, suiting their interest while finding out if a particular school was right for them.
Persona
Findings from the interviews were used further to develop the outlined persona of AMBS’ target group, resulting in the displayed profile.
User journey & experience map
A thematic analysis was used to identify behavioural commonalities in achieving the specified task scenario among the interviewees. While there were slight differences in their approach to the task, a common interaction pattern could be discovered, summarized with the displayed journey map.
Outlined persona
User journey & experience map
Synthesised improvement potential
Following the conducted research, the prioritized weaknesses and opportunities related to the user experience of AMBS’ website, determined using the PIE prioritization framework, were the following:
Weaknesses
No clear indication of how AMBS is perceived in the industry
No clear indication of the quality of AMBS’ student body
Text-heavy programme pages
Opportunities
Showcase stories from AMBS alumni
Better showcase career statistics for AMBS graduates
Showcase statements from industry executives or recruiters regarding AMBS graduates
Competitor assessments
Several competitor assessments were conducted to discover imitation and differentiation possibilities to better understand how AMBS could address these prioritised weaknesses and opportunities. Here I will only cover the assessment of London Business School (LBS), which website contained several unique insights for AMBS to draw from. The assessment was done through a heuristic evaluation, SWOT-analysis, and incorporated into the conducted usability study.
Summary of assessments
01 High-appealing content to top-quality candidates
02 The website clearly highlights prestige, quality of the international student body, quality of teaching, employment statistics, and the industry’s perception of graduates
03 This is achieved through infographics, photos, dedicated information sections, and short text containers on pages
04 Information architecture makes all essential information easy to read
LBS: Clear emphasis on the academic prestige of its masters degrees
LBS: Employment statistics are clearly outlined
LBS: Dedicated section for alumni stories
Information architecture & interaction design
Drawing from the gathered insights, I formed a specific problem statement to facilitate the ideation process by defining a clear aim with enough room for creative and varied solutions:
“How might we make prospective students feel confident about their career prospects as an AMBS graduate through the website?”
Several ideas to meet students’ needs were brainstormed. Then the ideas were organised based on their overarching topics using an affinity diagram, and finally prioritised based on three factors. These were the impact on prospective students, the feasibility of implementation, and what competitors are doing.
Affinity diagram
How may these topics and their related ideas be made into solution adopted by AMBS’ website?
An iterative approach of sketching and wireframing was used to explore possibilities for this, before landing on wireframes having sufficient potential to solve the specified weaknesses and meet the objective set by AMBS.
Wireframes
I designed 4 wireframes incorporating components addressing the identified weaknesses and opportunities.
Wireframe 1
Wireframe 2
Wireframe 3
Wireframe 4
What I learned
This project provided me with a more nuanced understanding of how key UX deliverables are used collectively to develop a cohesive client-facing report. Moreover, it was a great learning opportunity to explore the combination of data analytics, qualitative research, and visual mapping techniques to understand better and solve a defined persona's core needs. This was also was an interesting exercise in precisely and intuitively communicating critical findings to stakeholders, whilst always emphasising the return on investment of the propositions.