Background

Vancouver Community College has a Learning Centre that provides a large number of services, including tutoring, workshops, help for ESL students and numerous resources. 

The Learning Centre website was created a while ago. The website contradicts the latest VCC brand guidelines, looks too busy and needs redesign to help the students quickly book appointments and find the right information.

Challenge

1. Find out and analyze the main pain points of the current website users by means of survey.

2. Create a design of a user-oriented website for the Learning Centre.

3. Introduce a clear hierarchy with a visible call-to action: an invitation to make an appointment with the Learning Centre.

Solution

As a team leader, I decided to start with research and analyzing statistical information received from the Learning Centre website. Analytical information has revealed that only 12.5% of new visitors returned to the site in 2019. The bounce rate among new visitors was 75.16% (vs. 67.88% among returning visitors), which was alarming.

A series of user journeys conducted by the team revealed the main pain points, including wordiness of the website and the lack of hierarchy. The most popular characteristic was “confusing”.

The survey results have shown that a greater part of respondents use the Learning Centre as a quiet place to study, in addition to tutoring, printing services and computers. Over 40% of our respondents were ESL students.

The survey results have indicated that ESL students were not the only group using the Learning Centre and experiencing difficulties. This means that in addition to a visible call to action asked by the client, the design should be clean and meet the needs of both types of main users (ESL students and English native speakers). The landing page should clearly list all popular services and let any user quickly find the right information.

With this in mind, we made two user personas, prepared mockups for the main pages and created a user flow that would solve the issues highlighted above and let the users quickly book an appointment. To support the client’s brand identity in all media, we have used the current colour palette applied by VCC’s main website.

My role in the project: team leader, analysis and ideation, creating and conducting the survey along with Emilie St. Pierre, participation in all stages of design, planning and preparing the user flow.