Ready Education
Transforming User Experience for an Evolving Global EdTech Business
Ready Education, a provider of student experience platforms that enhance communication, engagement, and retention, faced a disconnect between its online presence and its expanded services.
Following several mergers, content from the newly added products was integrated into the website without consideration for the user journey. As a result, the site failed to reflect the full product offering, it featuring an outdated and inconsistent design, confusing navigation and messaging, and a lack of optimised digital marketing techniques.
UX/UI Designer
3 Months
EdTech
Challenge
Ready's business model involved diagnosing customer challenges and matching their needs with the most suitable product, considering location relevance (not all products were suitable for all locations). Changes to the website would need to take into account which product featured in which areas of the world and what benefits are available per product.
Design was outdated
The existing website lacked any clear user journey
Missing and incomplete pages
The navigation was confusing
The messaging was confusing
Solution
Address the inaccuracies of the website: Ensure all content accurately reflects the company's expanded range of solutions and services following mergers and acquisitions.
Create a user journey that truly focused on the challenges and needs of the user: Design a clear and intuitive experience that guides users to relevant information based on their specific needs and pain points.
Update the domain’s existing UI design to address its outdated visuals: Modernise the website's design to improve aesthetics, usability, and alignment with current design standards.
Explore any potential legacy domain problems: Identify and resolve technical or structural issues stemming from outdated systems or prior website versions to ensure seamless performance and user experience.
Addressing the site map
While the old structure no longer reflected the services Ready Education offered, there were also a number of broken links and poor UX practices in place. The website relied on feature driven content throughout the domain and didn’t address customer challenges or consider the user journey.
Following internal workshops and Gathering feedback from Gartner, we made some adjustments to the structure and put together a list of priorities for design and development.
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After
Wireframes
We created wireframes for each page and continuously reviewed if we were following the philosophy of resolving the user's challenges through a simple layout and varied user pathways.
Hi-Fidelity Design
After completing the low-fidelity designs and receiving approval from the head of marketing, we started on the high-fidelity work using Figma. Due to limitations within HubSpot and our dependence on an external web development partner, our strategy involved building a series of reusable components for the homepage to ensure consistency across the entire website.
Wherever a homepage module couldn’t be used to fulfil a specific need, we planned to engage our external partner for individual, bespoke projects.
Updating legacy resources
As discussed, my objective was to establish consistency throughout the entire domain. Below are examples showcasing the design refreshes that I have designed and successfully implemented.
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After
Before
After
Refining the User Experience: From Assumptions to Data-Driven Improvements
Our initial plan, reviewed and approved by Gartner, was to offer users of the EdTech persona the ability to navigate our website how they prefer (through team, challenge or product areas) offering pillar page content that led to content clusters. Doing so would move users from the top of funnel to middle of the funnel and finally ready to request a demo at the bottom of the funnel stage.
By reviewing our research data this process wasn’t as effective as we’d have liked, users often dropped off after visiting our gated pages or didn’t scroll far enough to reach our case studies. We believe this could be for several reasons:
Quality of content
Outdated content
PDF documents rather than webpages (continuation of user journey stops at the end of the document).
Hicks law: Too many options likely confused users (The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices).As a result we decided to reduce the number of options a user has on all key pages. This empowers us to set a clear objective for each page.
As a result, we decided to reduce the number of options a user has on all key pages. This empowers us to set a clear objective for each page.
