William Angliss Institute

The challenge

The Institute’s brief was to deliver a website with the following key objectives:

• drive student enquiries and enrolments for short courses and applications across all course types
• enable more sophisticated marketing through personalisation 
• be a best-in-class competitive tool against universities, TAFEs and Registered Training Organisations 
• reflect the Institute’s refreshed branding and specialist positioning. 

Underpinning these objectives was the Institute’s vision ‘to be the leading educational provider of Australian hospitality, tourism, food and culinary arts knowledge and expertise locally, nationally and internationally’. 

The Institute’s existing website, on JOOMLA, did not allow for the scale and level of digital marketing activity that it planned to undertake over the short-to-medium term future. In addition, the site was not providing the kind of journey that was required to offer students and prospective students a ‘best-in-class’ user experience.

What we did

The project kicked off with a three-month UX design process which took into consideration the very specific needs of the diverse audiences that interact with the site. As part of that process, it was discovered that the greatest hurdle users were facing was an overwhelming volume of information. For example, there could be up to six price tiers for any given course, depending on course location and the student’s local/international status.

This problem was addressed in the new site by presenting visitors with a self-screening dialogue box at the start of their journey on the site. Students select their status (local or international) as well as where they want to study, and then their entire experience of the site is personalised according to the selected parameters. This includes everything from the content on the home page, right through to the available courses that are displayed. So instead of being bombarded with options that aren’t actually available in the student’s region or prices that aren’t applicable, the student is only presented with information that actually applies to them. This high level of personalisation enables very specific messaging that ultimately optimises conversion.

The result

The new website has greatly enhanced the user’s ability to browse, search and compare courses – a process that was previously very overwhelming and complicated. The user journey is now a far more streamlined experience, with course information that may have previously taken 9 clicks to reach now accessible within 1-2 interactions. The improved user experience has resulted in an approximately 25% increase to visits to key course information pages.