Insurance tech
Reimagining university profiles to drive engagement and value
Overview
BridgeU is a guidance platform that supports students in their journey to finding the right university. One of our core features is university profiles, which are a key part of the value we offer to both students and our partners. Universities are looking to attract high-quality leads that lead to enrolments, while students want richer insights into university life, courses, and fees.
Problem
The current partner profile isnt recieved well, sales team avoids showing it
Students wish to have access to financial support details and richer information about universities
Current UX is not up to accessibility standards and needs an overhaul
Goals
Increasing partner acquisitions
Increase "add to list" conversion for partner profiles
Differentiate between standard and enhanced profiles
Improve the profile value and experience for students
Outcome
Impact
Led the redesign of university profiles by prioritizing information based on user research, securing leadership buy-in, and delivering a responsive, accessible solution.
Process
Research
Understanding the market and competitor analysis
Looking at what is standard in the market led me to look at other examples of how products handle profiles. I felt we could learn from products like Airbnb and Zoople to display media and information more efficiently.
Competitors: Niche, Cialfo and Scior
Other industry examples: Airbnb, Zoople and Hitched
User research
While we had a clear understanding of partner needs for university profiles, we wanted to ensure the experience delivered real value for students too. Through continuous user interviews, we had collected insights and feedback that could help us balance the business goals with our students needs.
They want more insight into financial aid and scholarships
Students want more visual and authentic information. They feel university websites can be too “sales” like and might not give an honest account.
More contextual information around university life and cost of living
New data points such as:
Flight time from their location
closest international airport
What kind of weather can they expect
Card sorting research exercise
To better understand which information and data points students valued on our university profiles, I decided to create a research activity to qualify what they thought was “most” to “least” valuable.
I used a research tool called Maze to set up a card sorting exercise, where students can sort the data points provided into one of three columns: most valuable, somewhat valuable, and least valuable.
Key findings
The data points that student found the most important are:
Scholarship/financial aid details
Application deadlines (for courses and universities)
University / course fees
Minimum entrance requirements (Grades: A levels, GPA etc)
University rankings
Define
Before jumping into ideation, I needed to understand the context and constraints. Key considerations included identifying entry points in the student journey and ensuring the profiles could scale across varying levels of data completeness. While partner profiles are often highly curated, many basic profiles contain significant data gaps. To design a flexible solution, I mapped data across all profile types to account for edge cases and ensure consistency.
New user journey + new entry points for profiles in the new product
Data map, I also created a spreadsheet for the developers that outlines the mapping of data to the different types of profiles.
Ideation
Ideation workshop
Believing that diverse perspectives and cross-functional collaboration are key to effective design, I led an ideation workshop with our engagement services team to uncover insights on what makes a compelling university profile leaning on their experience with students and universities.
Build your own university profile
Blue sky ideas
Virtual tour
A view of university accommodation, plus ratings
Source independent student testimonials (not provided by the university)
Link courses to a career outcome
Spotlight on courses or events the university wants to promote to students
Sketches
Design
With a solid foundation in place, I began exploring mid-fidelity designs to bring early concepts to life. At the request of our partnerships team, I also created a high-fidelity version to help showcase the vision to partners and gather early feedback on the concept.
I also made it a priority to review early designs with engineers and the product manager to surface technical constraints and align on feasibility from the start.
At a glance card + spotlight section
Testing
Collaboration with our partnership team
Early concepts were used by the partnership team in sales meetings to test the appetite for new and existing partners. This had some very positive feedback and we continued this thought-out the process.
User sessions
Organised and facilitated session with students, but limited in the number we could organise within the project scope and the time of year
As a fall back, we used internal teams to help test the UX and functionality
Key outcomes
Partners really liked the idea of a space to "spotlight" and promote a specific course or event
Students really liked the new design as it felt way more modern and current gen
Student felt like there was too much text overall, they didn't like to read a lot and wanted more visuals
Navigating within the profile space was much easier now that course profile aren't separated
Final designs
Based on the key findings and feedback from our users I updated the designs. They can now be properly refined with our developers and written up as user stories.
A pivotal moment in the project was the launch of our new branding, which I integrated into the final designs to ensure visual consistency and alignment with our new look and feel.
Responsive mobile view
Old profile design
Outcome
Overall the new profiles where well received by both students and partners which provided a more impactful sales pitch for the partnership team.
34% increase in partner profile views
This was key for impacting partner perception and much more impactful in attracting new partners.
Increased “add to list” conversion from a profile view 17.6% > 24.6%
While this was a good initial improvement, we did wan't to look at more ways to drive the conversion even higher.
Other metrics of interest
Increased media view conversion from 1.6% > 6.9%. Even though this landed well with our partners, this didn't do as well as we thought from the student perspective. It's seems that they are more interested in financial aid and there "most important" data points uncovered in the card shorting research.
Retrospective and challenges
Challenges
Limited access to users for research and testing
Beging part of a large student app re-build, we have quite heavy constraints on time and resource
Limited scope of adding new data, as there was no current budget to expand our sources and our CMS
Things to improve
Spend more time testing the design
Spend more time fully optimising the UX and UI for mobile. E.g. proper mobile navigation