When you take up a project on an education website homepage redesign, you are most likely to make this one rookie mistake that I was about to commit in my project. That mistake is not writing down the design principles.
If you are a trained UI/UX person, you would already know this. And, in fact, you must comment on the post and let me know if I am missing out on something. However, if you are business leader and, like me, have quite a good sense of design aesthetics, this discussion will greatly help you.
Let me tell you what that means.
Education Website Homepage Redesign Project Experience
Last year, the leadership of this Indian education company that I am consulting threw an interesting project towards me. It was to redesign their education website’s homepage. This is a company that has a huge presence in India, has over 200 physical locations in India and abroad, and is a big player in online education.
If you have followed some of my other works, you would know that while I am not a specialist UI/UX person by qualification, I have an MBA, but my sense of UI/UX especially for education websites, learning management systems (LMS) and SaaS products is quite developed.
So, I did what most would do – fire up my laptop and start designing the page straight away.
This was wrong. And I realized it when over the next few weeks.
Over the next few weeks, I made a few low-fidelity (lo-fi) mock-ups and did meetings with the management to take them through it.
The situation was interesting in all of those meetings. There were two problems:
- While they liked almost all the versions (there were 7 versions), they were hesitating in finalizing it. There were a lot of what-ifs. “What if we place this here”, “What if we add that on this fold”, “What if we add two more buttons” and “What if we also talk about that on the homepage”.
- I was presenting to two CxOs of the company and 4-5 senior management people. The two CxOs had differing views on what should the homepage be like. The senior management people’s opinion followed whoever their boss was and also on what made their work easier.
I was quick to realize that this project will never see the day of light. And even if it did, it would be an extremely underwhelming project for me because one set of stakeholders would always have a contrary opinion on the final design. And going by the meetings I realized that everything they were saying, all people, was logical and worth considering.
Considering the fact that design and aesthetics are extremely subjective, I had to find another way in which I could objectively bring them on the same page.
With some basic research and the CBO’s opinion, I quickly realized what I needed to do to get out of this important project out of this fix.
Steps of Education Website Homepage Redesign
As one would say for any business endeavor one would take, it is important to always start with the ‘Why’. And that is the first fundamental step that I had missed out on. But, that’s to this project, I learned it.
Here are the 3 broad steps that you, as a business leader, must go plan and execute for your educational website homepage redesign to be a success.
- Why are you doing this website redesign?
- What are the exact business requirements for the new design?
- What is the data that you are looking to improve?
Let me quickly take you through each of these steps.
Step 1 – Why are you doing this website redesign?
What you need to understand is that writing down and finalizing the business need of the redesign is crucial. Most early stage founders that I consult redesign their websites on a whim, just because “it needs to look a certain way”, or because they think “its time we redesigned our website, just like that”.
Those are almost always bad reasons to redesign your website homepage. That’s because when you redesign on a whim like that, you are likely to also not be happy with the new design for a very long time. Website homepage redesign is too expensive a decision to take on your mood.
Therefore, this needs to come from the business.
In case of the project that I did, the reasons came very clearly from the leadership. In our case some of the reasons were:
- Since the last redesign in 2017, the business and products have changed. Some new business verticals had come up that needed visibility and some products had been phased out.
- In their market mapping, the leadership realized that the competition had websites with more contemporary web design which signalled to the young students as a sign of being more hep.
- The homepage lacked a clear call-to-action (CTA). In the existing design, it was assumed that homepage is not the place to put a CTA and that homepage only had a routing function to relevant product and program pages.
Once I had discussed and finalized these insights, then came the second step of homepage redesign that could make all the difference between implementation and shelving of a project.
Step 2 – What are the business requirements from the new design?
This helped me clearly formulate business results that I, as a strategy consultant, would want to give to my client in this project. My thoughts coupled with in-depth discussions with the stakeholders gave us the following list of important business requirements.
- The homepage should cater to the largest audience so that business objectives are met.
- The 200+ physical centers should get clear visibility and discoverability from the homepage.
- At the same time, the homepage should serve as a router so that all visitors (students, investors and even B2B) can find their intended destination.
- The user should be able to start their learning for free and choose their program inside the LMS, not on the homepage.
- The user should be able to quickly find their way to the enrollment pages to pay the fee and start learning in paid programs.
Step 3 – What is the data that you are looking to improve?
With the business requirements clearly laid out and agreed upon, it is now important to find the way to quantify them. That means, finalizing the metrics that will be tracked to check for its improvement.
For the business outcomes that I mentioned above, here are the metrics that we decided to track.
| # | Metric to track | Relevance | Source of data |
| 1 | Bounce rate | As per the biz requirements, it was important that the largest audience of the website (i.e. MBA and Law aspirants) should find it easy to reach the MBA and Law homepages. Also, all stakeholders should be able to find what they came for. That means, lesser people would drop off and hence bounce rate should descrease. | Google Analytics |
| 2 | Time spent on page | This is a tricky metric. That’s because if the website is performing its intended routing function properly (i.e. user should be able to find what they came for) then time spent would drop. Also, if the redesign is not a job-well-done, even then the time spent on page will decrease. Ideally, this metric is to be seen in conjunction with the bounce rate. | Google Analytics |
| 3 | Clicks to key product pages | As our dominant audience is MBA and Law exam aspirants, the main links of their respective category pages should receive more clicks (in terms of %age of traffic) than before as we made these more prominent. | Microsoft Clarity |
| 4 | Scroll depth | One would argue that if all the important elements are placed clearly accessible in the first fold, it shouldn’t be a problem if the scroll depth decreases. However, in our case, in this redesign we decided to make the homepage extremely essential and hence it was desirable for the scroll depth the increase so that all the content that we wanted the user to read, they go through it. | Microsoft Clarity |
| 5 | Clicks to E-center | The company’s programs were sold from what they call as their “E-center” microsite. The clicks to this microsite should increase which means that the data should suggest that more users find their way to the E-center from the homepage. | Google Analytics |
Once you do this simple 3 step exercise, you would know exactly why are you redesigning your homepage and what metrics you need to track.
Conclusion – How are you planning your homepage redesign?
In this discussion, my objective was to share with you that there needs to be a philosophy behind your education website homepage redesign. A good redesign will take some time because understanding the need of the redesign, the business requirements and finalizing the metrics to track need to be finalized.
You could use these exact three steps. Let me know in the comments about your homepage redesign experience. Reach out to me to discuss your project and I would be happy to help you.
