Western Sydney University Digital Transformation
I have worked with Western Sydney University (‘Western’) for 7 years, during which time I have led full projects, led the discovery-design phases of projects throughout the student experience, and managed the client-agency relationship, My work with Western has helped deliver a large digital transformation, and involved rethinking the digital offering and evolving the university’s digital operations and ecosystem.
Overview
I started working with Western soon after they had made the decision to invest in the Adobe suite of digital products. The first job I worked on involved the first implementation of AEM and Adobe Analytics.
Since then I have helped them to transform every stage of the student experience.
The projects highlighted below appear in chronological order, with the phase in the student experience journey identified in brackets.
MyWestern (Retention)
My work with Western started by attempting something that no other University in Australia had done before - introducing a personalised portal for every student to help them manage their university life.
We merged 15 systems into the portal, which we named ‘MyWestern’. The portal was designed using a human centred design approach, and had the dual benefits of reducing student churn and improving the student experience.
In year 1 it was rolled out to all commencing first year students, before being rolled out to the entire student body of over 45,000 students.
I was the agency project owner, leading the research, design and front-end development teams to create the experience.
Future Students (Consideration - Conversion)
Once we had a successful Adobe pilot with MyWestern, the next big opportunity involved improving student recruitment by redesigning the Future Students section of the website and simplifying the enrolment process.
We redesigned the Future Students section of the site from the ground up. Based on user research findings, we:
Focused the site on helping prospective students to find a course, whether they knew exactly what they wanted to study or just knew what they liked doing
Made Western’s key points of different clear and prominent, and brought the student experience to life to help prospects image what life at Western would be like
Removed a lot of excess content to focus the site on what was really important
Created seamless user journeys with no dead ends to aid discovery, exploration and conversion.
The new Future Students section came with a much streamlined enrolment process, which reduced the steps required to enrol from 11 to 4. It also allowed Western to understand who was at what stage in the process at any point in time, so they could proactively contact people ‘stuck’ in the enrolment process and help them to complete it.
This time my agency product owner role extended to cover the back-end development and systems integration team as well as the design team.
Virtual Open Day (Awareness & Consideration)
Open Day is a vital part of any University’s student recruitment process, and with 65% of Western students being first in family to go too uni, Open Day takes on even greater importance. It was a chance for prospective students to visit the campus and get a feel for uni life, however in 2020 COVID had forced the closure of campuses and Western needed to pivot.
Working closely with my CTO, our teams created a Virtual Open Day where you could do everything you’d expect to do in-person, but online. We designed the full experience journey, designing everything from the online ads to the core online Open Day experience, and then did the technical build.
We launched Western’s first virtual open day with a mix of social, email, SMS, Adobe cloud, AWS and Zoom. We hosted 30 concurrent live chat rooms with academics, virtual campus tours, a wealth of course information and drove lead generation for applications.
We had 85% attendance from registered invitees, and our participation was double the previous year’s on campus event.
In 2021 COVID hit again, 3 weeks out from Open Day. Our team used participant feedback from the previous year to iterate, adapting elements of the experience to better suit a virtual experience. This included reducing the length of the course information sessions and introducing more peer-peer conversation opportunities.
We launched the site within 3 weeks and again hosted a seamless Virtual Open Day.
TrueRewards (Conversion)
The university offers landscape had changed, with more unis making guaranteed offers prior to ATAR results coming out. Western had developed it’s ‘True Rewards’ program, which offered year 12 students places at Western based on their overall school results, rather than just their final exam results.
I led a project to design the desired communications journey for True Rewards applicants. Students were able to apply between July and September, and could receive an offer in any one of those months, or not at all. So the early part of the communications journey focused on the personalised messaging that would be delivered to each prospective student in each offer round.
Once a student had received an offer, the messaging evolved to focus on getting them excited, reassuring them of their decision, and starting to build a relationship with Western. Students that didn’t get early offers received different messaging, including explaining how to change their course preference, and how to apply to Western through UAC.
To get to the final communication journey, after undertaking user and comparative research, we workshopped collaboratively with the client to build the framework and agree some key decisions and principles. From there my Experience Strategist and I were able to complete the rest of the detail required.
International Students (Awareness - Conversion)
COVID forced many international students to return home, and stopped others from being able to travel to Australia to study, or even to get a visa. This meant that international student numbers declined across the board, and the competition to acquire more became even more intense.
I led a team to reimagine the International Students website for Western. We knew that International Students had a broader set of needs than Domestic Students, as they are moving country and many have never been to Australia before, so there is more information that they need to know.
We also knew that they were already accessing our course information via the main Western site, so the International Students web experience needed to complement that site, and provide seamless transitions/
We started the project by undertaking a Discovery Phase, during which we spoke to the subject matter experts - international students & the International Students team; as well as speaking to key stakeholders, immersing ourselves in the existing experience, and reviewing previous research and analytics.
Some of the key things we learnt were:
The decision on where to study internationally was not made alone, and we had 4 key audiences with different needs
Our focus needed to be on inspiration and reassurance. We couldn’t rely on rankings alone, so we needed to talk about the things that really matter to International Students and their parents: quality education, performing well, being supported, becoming work ready, and creating opportunities post-university
The current experience has masses of content to read, but it was disparate and disjointed. It needed to be unified, more visual and immersive
The steps to Western may feel the same, but unique situations mean there are unique requirements, so we wanted to create an experience that gave clarity to the process and made prospects feel like it had been tailor made for them
These learnings enabled us to design creative concepts, and develop the desired user flows and information architecture for our International Students website.
We started our Define Phase with collaborative sketching sessions, and then moved onto wireframing and concept design. The collaborative sketching sessions enabled us to get input from a diverse range of thinkers at an early stage in the process.
Throughout this phase, and our subsequent Design Phase, we iterated extensively and based on the feedback from our subject matter experts.
At each stage we talked through where the designs were at, why we had made the decisions we had made, and the content that would be required. We received feedback from the subject matter experts, and built that into our next Sprint. We used this approach from sketching to low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity wireframes, and finally UI design.
The end result received extremely positive feedback from a range of stakeholders and is now being used heavily by Western’s International Students team in their recruitment efforts.
Summer Series (Retention)
As a university that genuinely cares about their students’ success and welfare, Western decided to run a series of events over summer, in particular for international students remaining in Sydney, but open to everyone. They included everything from beach safety days, to bush walks, excursions to cricket matches and online trivia nights.
Western wanted a way to promote these consistently, so they felt like a series of events rather than random individual events.
My team developed a series of event templates to cover a range of different channels, from posters to digital banners, social media posts, website hero images and on-campus digital screen ads. We designed the templates to showcase the event itself through imagery, with a Summer Series logo lock-up to signify the event was part of the series, and different levels of event information depending upon the channel being used and the real estate available.
I also authored a Summer Series Communications Plan that covered owned channels and social media, as well as the recommended messaging.
Impact
My work contributed to Western being a significantly different business now to what it was when I started working with them. Some highlights have been:
MyWestern was identified by rival universities as a point of competitive advantage for Western
Enrolment numbers have steadily risen, despite intense competition and disruptions from COVID, with the Future Students website, and the streamlined enrolment process playing important roles
The feedback received when speaking to students about the experiences we have designed and created
Delivering consecutive years of Virtual Open Day experiences that exceeded expectations