The website’s financial model is largely based on banner advertising, due to which there is a great importance on SEO, page views, and user visits, and the banner positions themselves. 

The top level brief was to redesign the legacy (Wordpress) website, improving user journeys, overhauling the design to increase legibility and UX, and consulting on editorial content direction and information and data presentation. 

Discovery

With over a 15 years of leading design projects for digital publishing, my experience was rooted in maximising traffic and click through rates on advertising banners by creating story packages, related stories, in-article links, etc. Therefore, much of the phase focused on adding functionality to streamline how parents searched and browsed for schools. 

As a parent my own experience was insightful in prospective end users requirements. Other personas were examined such as parents of children changing schools, teachers and headmasters wishing to keep abreast of news, and several others.

Key Insights & Challenges

• UI: The legacy website was a Wordpress theme, very chaotic and hard to navigate.

• Users: Parents found the site cluttered and struggled to find the information they were looking for.

• Traffic: Bound and exit rates were very high. We needed to improve stickiness across the site.

• Find / Search / Filter: Schools were found by a very basic search. There was no way to find schools based on key decision-making inputs like cost, or curriculum.

• Responsively: The legacy site was not responsive which was clearly a major concern.

Approach

• Stake-holder and inhouse developer interviews and collaboration sessions.

• Conducting reader personas research and interview sessions. 

• Deep dive into legacy website and editorial structure. 

• Editorial staff interviews focusing on wants and needs.  

• Facilitating discussion around new editorial content and school data requirements and creation.

• Rapid wireframing for editorial sections. 

• Sketch look and feel presented as a prototype showing basic page interaction for content pages.  

• Research, presentation and facilitating discussion around various search and filtering functionality from reference points such as Google Flights, Google Fonts, etc. 

• Iterative UI build, switching between page composition, components creation, and handover to development and QA.