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3 Steps for Improving UX in Higher Education
Apr 04, 2023 • 3 Minute Read • Ross Lucivero, Chief Product Officer
As digital experiences become increasingly complex and interactive, it’s clear that UX has to be a fundamental consideration during every step of the design process. However, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to UX.
In a digital commerce scenario, for example, UX can make all the difference between a smooth checkout process and a clunky buying experience that creates cart abandonment issues. Solving these problems requires a deep understanding of your primary users.
Unfortunately, that can be more complicated in the higher education industry. Your website has to serve a wider audience than most, covering everyone from current and prospective students to faculty, staff, high school counselors, family members, job seekers, alumni, and more.
It’s not enough to deliver a UX that tries to satisfy everyone. As user expectations for digital experiences rise, higher education institutions need to address the UX problem.
The Need for Better UX in Higher Education
In recent years, digital transformation has been a focal point for higher education institutions of all sizes. Updating outdated tools and processes with emerging technologies creates new competitive advantages. They boost profitability, deliver better customer and student experiences, and increase operational efficiencies.
While that all sounds great, digital transformation can’t just be a push to implement technology for the sake of technology. According to Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education:
“We’re using technology in ways that duplicate traditional practice; we’re not using it to transform education. If you go through it from a user-design experience point of view, you’ll see where we take a traditional approach and use technology to digitize it, such as turning paper textbooks into digital textbooks. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with an exact digital replica of the challenges we currently face in our education system. We’re very quickly recreating them in a digital format.”
To this point, higher education institutions have been slow to embrace UX design, often leaving UX testing to untrained faculty and staff. Institutions that continue to fall behind competitors from a UX perspective could risk seeing drops in admissions applications, student performance, alumni engagement, faculty participation in classroom technology, and more.
It’s time for higher education institutions to embrace UX design and create digital experiences that inspire their many users. That may seem easier said than done, but emerging trends in UX can help point you in the right direction.
3 UX Trends for Higher Education Institutions
Whether you just went through a redesign or it’s been a while since you’ve upgraded your digital presence, your institution can likely benefit from new UX testing. Digging into user satisfaction can generate valuable insights for improving your experiences.
When you’ve found that your digital experiences aren’t quite meeting the needs and expectations of your users, the following three UX trends can help close the gap.
1. Modular Design
Because there are so many different users that you have to satisfy, flexibility is a key to UX success for any higher education institution. You don’t have the luxury of designing within rigid templates that serve ultra-specific goals. Instead, you need a design that gives you the freedom to update blocks of content as you learn more about the needs of your unique users.
Whereas a template-based design might give you visually appealing web pages, a modular design that leverages reusable components focuses more on the practicality of each page, giving you the flexibility to build aesthetics into the experience in ways that don’t detract from UX.
2. Discoverability
Your users need to find and access the information they need quickly and seamlessly, including submitting an admissions application, downloading a syllabus, or registering for an alumni event. The web designs that have become popular in recent years, with flashy graphics and minimalist approaches to content, don’t serve these needs. Instead, they often leave users digging through complicated navigation controls, unable to find pages.
Focusing on discoverability and optimizing conversions can make designing for user needs easier. Instead of trying to improve engagement with graphics, streamline UX to help users get to the right places and embrace a more intuitive design.
3. Accessibility
User experience is as much about accessibility as it is about usability. Especially in higher education, it’s critical that you do more than adhere to loose ADA and WCAG 2.1 guidelines. Your ability to deliver accessible designs can be a major factor in experiences for enrollment and admissions and for students, faculty and staff.
There are many ways you can address web accessibility across your digital experiences. More recent universal web design trends include closed captions for video content, detailed alternative text and image tags, keyboard-friendly website navigation, voice-enabled functionality, and enhanced screen reader compatibility. Users of all abilities should have the same opportunities to use your digital experiences (especially as they become more fundamental to your institution). UX design plays an essential role in making that happen.
Getting Ahead of UX Trends in Higher Education
The question is whether you're equipped to start formally testing UX and implementing these trends. You may have the technology but aren't able to employ a deep team of UX pros. Closing the UX gap and getting ahead of these trends may require outside help. And that’s where we can help.
Interested in upgrading UX across your digital experiences? Let's talk.