BestColleges.com

Lead | Strategy | UX & UI | Branding

Redefine the user experience and visual branding for BestColleges.com. Establish the site as the top of mind “go-to” authoritative multi-channel brand for college rankings, information gathering, and guidance related to all things collegiate. Build trust, authority, and social proof with future alumni (our users), friends, families, organizations, and universities alike. Also, accomplish this without taking a hit in revenue (mgmt!).

BestColleges.com is the flagship website (~18M yearly revenue and rising) of Higher Education’s premium portfolio of industry-leading enrollment service websites in the online education space.

The Challenge:

  1. Taking Stock  >
    Thoughts on approaching the challenge and a quick look at some of the new brand elements.

  2. Research & Strategy  >
    UX/UI legacy design audit, interviews, personas, and brand story.

  3. UX, UI, Brand Redesign  >
    UX & UI, design system, brand visual updates,

  4. The Results  >
    Implementation, testing, test results

Process:

1 . Taking Stock

Higher Education’s team members are digital experts. Marketing, search engine optimization, research, UX/UI design, testing, conversion rate optimization, and visual design. When it comes to creating online and offline multi-channel brand strategy, we realized we needed to consult and partner with brand strategy experts to bring the next generation of BestColleges.com to fruition.

My responsibilities included the site audit, research, updated user experience, visual design, and the creation, management, and implementation of our new RFP process. Other responsibilities included, managing partner relationships, timelines, budgets, hands on research, strategy, and UX/UI design. Directly below, you can view the updated UX, UI, & brand.

2 . Research & Strategy

This particular audit was performed in order to identify and outline opportunities for optimization and to create a new, clean, single design system and code base. We identified and collated the numerous page templates, design patterns, and many snowflakes (of each) that existed on the within the existing code base.

UX/UI LEGACY DESIGN AUDIT:

To help inform our next-gen branding and design, we put together user interviews, set up various user mapping tools, and reviewed legacy website analytics. I was personally responsible for reviewing and collating all of the data to make informed observations and recommendations. My role also included creating the pitch deck and providing the pitch presentation..

PERSONA & BRAND STORY DEVELOPMENT, OPPORTUNITY MAPPING:

We worked with our brand partners to setup multiple surveys for several personas we believed might be important to the success of BestColleges.com. Based on our feedback two primary Persona types (EDUs & Students), each with three sub persona sets evolved. The EDU’s are often our partners and greatest champions of the brand. Within the EDU persona, three distinct segmentations became clear; Marketers, Academics, and Administrators. Of the Student persona, we identified and named the three sub segmentations;

Climbers (focused on climbing corporate ladder, often continued education), Switchers (looking for a new field of study or career), and Explorers (still in a discovery phase). Once we established our personas, we set out to identify areas of opportunity for each persona by utilizing affinity mapping. Based on the results we were able to identify areas in need of improvement and prioritize accordingly for the brand re-launch to ensure we were covering as many pain or frustration points as possible.

3 . UX, UI, Brand Redesign

UX/UI, DESIGN SYSTEM, BRAND VISUAL UPDATES

As our branding strategy became more refined, and the revised brand began taking shape, we began fleshing out our new design system. Armed with our new personas and the information obtained from interviews, affinity mapping exercises, and a short design sprint, we also started addressing some of the needs identified through those processes.

Mobile being a big one, historically, desktop over-represented our user base but that was all changing. Combine that with Google switching to a mobile first indexing algorithm, we needed to adapt and quickly. We also began focusing on complying with ADA compliance measures all while working towards a 5 week turnaround to get everything in order and ready for development.

4 . THE RESULTS

Utilizing our newly overhauled user experience, websites monetization strategy, brand guidelines, and the brands voice/tone, we completed the work on the next evolution of the bestcolleges.com. Initial tests provided positive feedback. Even better our live test (50% traffic) indicated a significant uptick in projected yearly revenue (mgmt!). These updates ultimately contributed to a projected ~2MM increase in yearly revenue after relaunch. My team also designed, tested and launched a new search results filter (mobile wireframe mockups above) that allowed the user to further optimize their search, resulting in a marked increase in form submissions and an additional revenue increase of ~1.25MM yearly.

Since I left Higher Education in 2020, they were acquired by another company and their internal teams took over the progression and development of the site/brand to align with their other education related web properties. Unfortunately, the live site no longer exists in this iteration for review.