Hogeschool Utrecht (HU) had a desire to personalize their brochures for prospective students, similar to the approach of the KLM iFly magazine. This would allow HU to offer more personalized content to students and better engage them. To further develop this idea, a design spint was organized in collaboration with the agency Valsplat.
CHALLENGE
Design Sprint
The Design spint resulted in the realization that it was not just about creating a personalized magazine, but mainly about collecting valuable personal information on the website. The need turned to saving and liking courses.
There was also the technical challenge of how to realize this functionality. Will this be implemented in the backend or will a frontend solution be developed to offer this. The use of emoticons also had to be taken into account to minimize page load time.
APPROACH
Summarize the course in 5 bulletpoints
Several aspects were carefully considered when approaching the project. One of the main challenges was to create an overview of all courses offered by the HU and summarize them concisely in 5 bullet points per course. To make the information easily scannable and the content appear more friendly, it was decided to use matching emojis.
In addition, the focus was on determining the right location to apply the functionality for highlighting favorite courses. It was essential to properly think out different interactions and scenarios to optimize the development of this functionality within the limited time.
RESULTS
Liking courses as you normally do in webshops
The end result of the project is a platform where prospective students can save trainings as favorites by liking them.
Check all your favorites courses at a glance
Overview
A personalized overview is available in which all favorite trainings are displayed. Each course is summarized in five topics via bulletpoints and a emoticon. The platform will later also offer the possibility to show personalized content to users, for example related to their study process.
Saving and sharing
Furthermore, there is the option to share courses with others, such as parents or dean, via e-mail.
Animations
To make the experience more enjoyable, we put a lot of effort into various animations to make it more appealing to end users.
The options for saving a course are in the most obvious spots possible, at the overview and at several places on a course page.
LEARNINGS
Mapping independencies
During the process, we paid too little attention to the different scenarios and the possible consequences of certain interactions. It was also confusing what techniques the college and the development partner could use to enable training to be stored. We should have identified these factors earlier so that choices and steps could be made more quickly.
Project details
Client
Hogeschool Utrecht
Year
2022 — 2023
Collaboration
Eight
My role
UX Designer
Skills
UX Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
Tooling
Figma
