A help centre to alleviate overwhelming student enquiries.
Year
2022
UX Design
Visual Design
User Research
Persona
Deliverables
Figma
Miro
Dovetail
Airtable
Tools
Background
The University of New South Wales (UNSW) is a leading Australian public research university, located in Sydney. Founded in 1949, UNSW is consistently ranked as one of the top universities in Australia and is widely recognized for its world-class research and innovative teaching programs. UNSW identified a need for a centralized Student Help Centre that would provide students with easy access to resources, services, and, support. The aim was to create a user-friendly online platform that would make it easier for students to find the information they need and get help with their academic and personal issues.
The UNSW team were facing an overwhelming amount of enquiries to the online help centre and wanted to redirect students to do their own research and learning onsite before contacting the University. However, the help content provided by UNSW were displayed across a range of microsites and written by various authors, so users faced the issue of 1. struggling to find the relevant information in a broad digitial ecosystem, and 2. conflicting information across multiple UNSW sites.
The UNSW team wanted to redesign the Student Hub (help centre), understand student expectations for contact methods, reduce friction through the student journey, and ultimately, reduce enquiries to the student help centre. As this project would be leading into a bigger piece of work and used for the client to write a business case for internal stakeholders, we worked closely with the UNSW team to ensure success.
My role on the project was as UX and UI Designer, working closely with a member of the Strategy team. With a tight turnaround of 4 weeks, we had to be strategic about our focus areas.
Objective
Discovery and Research
We kicked off this project by analysing existing data provided to us by the University, to identify pain points in the journey and opportunities for focus for this project.
As we moved into the Research phase, I created discussion guides for interviews we conducted, and were put in touch with existing UNSW students through the client, interviewing 8 students total. We conducted our interviews over two days using Teams for the calls, Dovetail to capture the interview recordings and synthesise the data, and documented it all in Airtable.
Through this Research phase, we uncovered the larger problem at hand: the current student journey wasn’t allowing students to learn about the UNSW digital landscape during enrolment, leading to increased enquiries further on in their journey. There was great opportunity for this learning to be front-loaded in the student life cycle to better prepare students for their commencing studies, providing them with the necessary tools and pathways to access relevant information from UNSW.
I presented these insights back to the client as well as a student persona which we would use to steer the designs.
Design
Before kicking off the Design phase, I conducted a co-design workshop with the client to ensure we were aligned on the pages most effective for the business case and the strategy for the deliverables. We worked together to decide on which pages required mock ups and to what fidelity these would be produced.
As identified in the Research phase, there was great opportunity for students to do much learning about the UNSW digital ecosystem prior to beginning term. Based on this insight, we proposed to the client an additional page to be developed - a new student Onboarding Hub which would help new students move through the application process, providing relevant articles and content, to alleviate the need for seeking help down the line.
Using the insights gained from their research and the persona created, I developed high-fidelity mock ups for the Student Help Centre and new Onboarding Hub pages. The designs focused on providing easy access to resources and services related to academics, relevant semester dates, career support, and frequently asked questions. We introduced features such as a chatbot for quick assistance which could help redirect students to relevant pages. I also created an alternate version of the new Onboarding Hub page to highlight the changes in content for someone in another lifestage, based on personalisation.
Redesigned Student Hub (help centre) page.
New Onboarding Hub (life stage: Enrolment).
New Onboarding Hub (life stage: Post-Enrolment).
The Result
The Student Hub Discovery project was successful as it was built on a foundation of user research and testing. By understanding the needs and goals of their target audience, we were able to design an experience that met the needs of students and provided them with the support they needed to succeed.