UCLA Extension is the largest single campus continuing education program in the world – offering over 5,000 courses and serving over 40,000 students every year.
UCLA Extension’s new responsive web site has an elegantly simple layout, a foundation for personalization, stronger infusion of the UCLA brand and an approach that allows students to form deeper connections with campus and industry networks.
Our redesign significantly increased student perception of the effectiveness of navigation, ease of use, and visual appeal.
From Confusion to Clarity
Through collaboration, user feedback, and iteration, we were able to significantly improve usability. Our responsive solution provides a seamless transition across form factors, yet optimizes interactions at each touchpoint. Use of cards simplifies the interaction and allows for a seamless responsive design. Table displays are simplified. Copy is clear, succinct and persuasive. By providing contextually relevant help, we ward off confusion and allow students to keep moving forward. Progressive disclosure is used throughout the site to surface high-level information. Students can drill down if interested. The experience is less overwhelming, easier to navigate and more likely to convert. By surfacing the most common actions we simplify completion of the most frequently sought tasks.
Personalization
UCLA Extension offers thousands of courses, but there becomes a point where choice becomes more debilitating than liberating. Our design framework uses both context and personalization to highlight the courses and certificates a student is most likely interested in pursuing. We created a framework for personalization to track student behavior, get smarter over time, and optimize content delivery for usefulness and conversion.
Leveraging the Power of UCLA’s Brand
UCLA’s brand is a primary reason that students choose the program, hence we leverage the power of the brand across the site. An inaudible looping homepage video emphasizes UCLA’s prestige. Succinct data-based value propositions overlay the video. These value propositions change to align with the site’s increased understanding of the visitor. Quality of instructors and guest speakers is rated as the number one strength by UCLA Extension students, hence we highlight instructor profile across course and certificate pages. We also created robust instructor pages to highlight instructors’ personal brands.
Connection to Campus & Network
In order to differentiate, we tapped into differentiating factors that make UCLA so unique — its campus and influential network. Social networking feeds and featured events offer students opportunities to get involved with the UCLA community. Our microconversion strategy collects small amounts of information from prospects (e.g., email address) in order to continue the conversation. This approach helps optimize personalization and remarketing efforts.