EF Academy Website
EF Academy is an international boarding school that provides world-class education for high school students in the US and the UK.
In 2020, I was the lead designer in the website redesign, which represents four schools in 18 languages and serves 23 admissions teams around the globe.
Timeframe
14 months
Core team
Product owner, designer,
developer
My responsibilities
Prototyping, user testing, visual design, design implementation
A move to a new domain, CMS and tech stack gave us the opportunity to overhaul our website from the ground up.
Priority is to move to a ‘campus-first’ structure and to address feedback that the old site makes us ‘look like a fake school’.
Storytelling approach
We gather content requirements with admissions staff in a workshop, where each group is given a persona and asked to think through the typical questions along their journey to join the school.
The Protector
The Ambitious
The Entrepreneur
The Explorer
From the information gathered we built a site architecture, mapping journeys for each user through the content targeting ‘see’, ‘think’ and ‘do’ stages.
Each campus will have its own ‘mini-site’ connected by an ‘EF Academy’ homepage.
Co-designed content
We ideate content and design in sprints with cross-functional teams. Each sprint produces a prototype of a page for us to start testing.
To tell the story of the campuses, we focus on these topics (which later became pages in the website):
- campus life
- academics
- co-curriculars
Build, test learn
Both the product owner and myself are enthusiasts of the agile approach – doing ‘just enough’ to confirm our hunches and direction whilst continuously iterating and refining our concepts and this is how we approached this project.
A lean build
Coronavirus disruption massively impacted resources and timeline. We streamlined modules into a ‘minimum kit of parts’ to achieve our design goals with limited development.
Debrief
Looking back I’m so proud of what we were able to achieve with a very lean team.
As a result of this redesign, I would hope to see an increase in engagement metrics such as time on page, time on site and number of pages visited.
If was to do this project again, I would run a quiz on the original site to take an ititial reading on user satisfaction so we could quantify the overall improvement to the user experience through the redesign.
Ngaire Wex UX / UI Designer
Elsewhere online:
