Challenge & Research Goals
EducationDynamics is a company providing marketing and enrollment management to their partner universities. Their mission is to expand opportunity through education by helping schools find and engage future students through their suite of services.
During the research, the UX team of EducationDynamics realized that the information they have about the prospective students and their behavior is mostly quantitative. They got really good at generating and analyzing heatmaps, working with data from Google Analytics and other sources.
However, they were still missing a big part of the picture – qualitative data, which would allow them to better understand how prospective students navigate specific pages of partner’s websites and where they face issues.
According to Lani Mott, UX Strategist & Designer at EducationDynamics,
Our approach to marketing is driven by data, and we are always on the lookout for data that will help us better understand and engage students on behalf of our clients. From our research and extensive work in the field, we know what motivates and moves students to action.
We know from our research that students make their decisions quickly and consider only a small set of schools – according to our latest research, 80% of online students consider 3 or fewer schools. So, it’s critical that we maximize our engagement with students that visit our clients’ websites.
And, we know that delivering a better user experience positively impacts our performance at every level. That is why it was important to us to invest in a tool like UXtweak – to better understand their behaviors along the consideration and engagement journey.
Solution
The UX team of EducationDynamics uses UXtweak to conduct research on a regular basis. It serves as a compass every time they want to understand why users may not be requesting information or may not be applying.
We want to get that qualitative data, but we'll focus it on a specific area of study. For example, we're looking at the accounting pages, health care pages on the website. So we'll focus our research on the content or the theme of those pages.
Understanding user behavior and identifying issues with usability testing
The majority of the time Lani is using Website Usability Testing Tool and Mobile Testing Tool to understand the preferences and behavior of prospective students.
The team is running anywhere around 2-6 unmoderated tests each month, mostly testing live websites, their mobile versions and any new pages, after launch.
If our partners are launching a new page for a specific program on their website, or are adding new content to the page, we want to understand users’ qualitative data and feedback from that new page.
A lot of our tests are also conducted for completely redesigned websites that our partners are launching.
Lani highlights that she and her team also often conduct site-wide task-based usability testing on partner’s websites to understand if users are able to find the information they need and access it, while also gaining qualitative feedback about the new design and the layout of that website.
Improving navigation with tree testing
Lani mentions that they also occasionally test the navigation of those websites using a Tree Testing Tool to evaluate their proposed navigation compared to the original one, in order to understand where users are getting lost on the website and what can be improved:
When a new website is going live, we want to evaluate the proposed navigation structure that the client has given. In this case, we do a tree test. This way we are able to make our own recommendations and propose an improved navigation structure based on the results of the tree test, compare the two and choose the best option.
For example, in one tree test conducted with our proposed navigation, we found that it resulted in a 13% improvement in task success rate, a 31% improvement in directness (answers chosen without backtracking), and a 25% improvement to time on task. This was a big win!
Outcome
According to Lani, being able to conduct those tests and work with qualitative data really helps the team guide their partners in the right direction when it comes to UX optimization.
By analyzing insights from user tests Lani and her colleagues are able to propose comprehensive solutions for usability issues, pinpoint areas of improvement, and back up those proposals with data. One of such improvements resulted in 80% increase in inquiry form completions for one of the pages.
They also gather enough qualitative data to understand patterns in user behavior and try to predict the kind of information they may be looking for on specific pages:
We want to understand what users are looking for before they click those buttons to request information or to apply, and understand what they would want to see before they apply to the school or even before they consider attending.
For example, as a result from one of our usability tests, we found that users expected important content on a program page that was missing. We designed a component for that missing information and A/B tested it. Thanks to these valuable insights, adding the important content resulted in an 80% increase in inquiry form completions for that program page
Conducting usability tests also helps Lani analyze sentiments and get more descriptive feedback from users:
We gather insights into users' positive, negative, and neutral sentiments, which I interpret during the analysis. If I'm asking qualitative questions in a study and it's not necessarily a task, I’m usually asking users to describe something on the page. That information is really helpful to understand users' perception of a specific piece of information or an experience.
Understanding user perceptions, expectations and the way they navigate products really helps the UX team of EducationDynamics come up with ways how to optimize partner’s websites for higher engagement and application rates:
Based on the data from a usability testing study, we found that 70% of users misinterpreted a CTA dropdown field and button to a form page as a program filter. As a result, we built out a program filter on a website page for one of our partners. We’re excited to launch an upcoming A/B test to validate this new feature to better meet our users’ needs.
👉 Why UXtweak?
Price was absolutely the deciding factor with all of the availability of the different testing features. I found that it was a lot of value and very robust for the price point that it was offered at.
Lani also emphasizes that one of the biggest deciding factors was the ability to recruit test participants directly from UXtweak User Panel. This is the only way Lani and her team handle recruiting, due to it’s efficiency.
We like that UXtweak handles the user panel, the incentivization, recruitment. It does all of that for us and we don't have to worry about it.
