Online Conversion for Nation's Largest University
Holistic website re-alignment + re-design to optimize conversion for UCF Online
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Project Overview
UCF is one of the nation's largest universities, and their online program continues to be top-ranked and highly popular. UCF engaged me to provide holistic design strategy and solutions for a redesign of the entire UCF Online website to optimize conversion and improve user experience.
Execution
Standing out in a crowded digital world these days is challenging. There are hundreds of online higher-education sites across the country vying for limited search engine ranking space. Pairing this with the need to develop a site that balances the opportunities for visitors to connect with your brand and tell your story, creating a compelling user experience, and optimizing the layout and content of the site to enhance operational and strategic goals, can be a daunting task. At the core of the UCF Online project, we aimed to meet all of these objectives.
With a goal of improving core site metrics and enhancing an action-oriented user experience, the UCF Online website went through a full redesign and strategy re-alignment. The project incorporated a combination of UX design best practices, on-page qualitative research, tracked analytical site data, and strong design elements culminating in a refreshed site with stronger engagement and visibility.
We started with robust discovery and a deep dive into user behavior and user experience data. This deep dive included a review of the website, along with a review of industry and non-industry best practices on conversion focused websites. This produced conversion optimized wireframes, which formed the foundation for creating full design comps based on the UCF Pegasus Design System. We worked directly with developers at UCF to build out the flows, and also incorporated this design strategy into other engagement channels like email.
This hands-on, data-driven approach was key to engaging with the various stakeholders across the university, and ultimately led to a wildly successful redesign that helps UCF remain at the forefront of online education. #ChargeOn
Results
Increased Organic Traffic—measured by year-over-year (YoY) traffic. Following the redesign, UCF's YoY organic traffic has increased by more than 50% and new user metrics have increased by 47%.
Increased Lead Volume—measured by YoY lead count, which has increased by over 40%. On-site metric comparisons of core data show visitors are staying on the site longer, navigating between pages easier, and engaging with the various call to action opportunities at a higher rate. This, combined with a positive post-launch qualitative research review of the site conducted with hundreds of current and prospective students, as well as real-time feedback from the various internal and external stakeholders involved in the project, has proven that UCF Online is standing out in the crowd.