Sport coursesGLL College
GLL College offer courses and training in the sports and leisure industry for both individuals and businesses. Their website wasn’t fulfilling the needs of their users so it needed new functionalities and interface.
The product space
GLL College – leading UK provider of courses and training in sports and leisure.
The brief
Complete revamp of the brand and design a new website.
The work
Discovery, creative workshops, design concepts, various brand collateral, website designs
Introduction
The client’s request was to achieve a complete revamp of their platform in terms of performance, user experience, and look and feel. In order to achieve that, I had to start from the basics which meant analysing the current performance of their platform and finding the user pain points before suggesting ways to improve the UX. The full proposed scope included:
- Personas
- Quantitative research (Google Analytics, heatmaps)
- Qualitative research (surveys and polls)
- User flows
- Low- and high-fidelity prototype (multiple iterations)
- Developer hand-off of final designs
Initial research
I added heat / scroll / click mapping to the key pages, as well as set up screen recordings to track users behaviour when on the site. While these were capturing over the following weeks, I took a look at Google Analytics to gather insights into high-level user demographics, behaviour and preferences.
User personas and flows
The insights from the analytics shaped the initial draft of the various user personas. Based on their needs and desires, and together with the collected data, I mapped out new user flows and information architecture.
Direct user interviews were organised to gain insights and confirm the hypotheses made in the user personas and flows.
I also set up a voluntary survey on the GLL site to capture some high-level feedback from our current users, and iterated on the questions to really hone in on the assumptions that were created on the basis of the quantitive research.
UX improvements
A key milestone in the project was converting all the insights into actions. The next was to apply the knowledge and feedback of the user research into a new and improved interface. I created low-fidelity wireframes to clearly illustrate what the need updates, why the changes are necessary and also how they will improve the overall UX and website performance.
UI design
The final stage was to create new UI designs which are still adhering to the brand guidelines but give the website a slicker, fresher look. Once the new look and feel was approved, I applied the updated UI kit to the signed-off wireframes and handed off the project to the developers.
Outcome
This approach allowed the team and the stakeholders to not only create a better version of their platform with a refreshed look and extra functionalities, but also to give voice to their users and discover crucial details about the the faults in the user experience and therefore – the conversion rates!
A key moment was finding out that there was a very high % of people who said they didn’t find what they were looking for on the site, which eventually lead GLL to reconsider their general offering and re-evaluate their business strategy. This only goes to show the power of user research!
