Prime Digital Academy UX Review
Prime Digital Academy came to our team for suggestions on future iterations of their websites. Prime offers tech-focused educational programs for individuals looking to change careers into software development or user experience design in a matter of months, not years. They want to find ways to help prospective students self-assess their compatibility with the goals and expectations of Prime.
Journey Map
For the initial research of our project, we analyzed secondary markets, institutional analogs, and surveys. We started out by conceptualizing a user who did not know what a coding boot camp was and who would do some basic research on the topic.
We used these to identify pain points and underlying causes for potential drop-offs in user activity, sourced both from within the ecosystem of the site as well as from redirects from advertisements around Facebook, Twitter, and external websites.
The Prime staff overwhelmingly identified the on-site interviews as a point within the application process wherein applicants are able to assess if Prime is a good fit or not. The interviews are conducted by Fred and Christy so we coined this phenomenon as the “Fred and Christy effect.”
Website Analytics
Understanding what information-seeking users possible applicants may encounter will help us understand how this demographic make decisions about alternatives and what will be relevant to them. Survey data is our other analytical tool.
Our team has access to analytics from Prime’s website to help us understand how people learned about Prime and if there was a past connection. Very few users are finding out about Prime and sending in an application based on an ad. This tells us the flow with those “not referred" users are hitting barriers. We can conclude that a portion of the market we are not tapping into currently is being turned off by our website presence.
User Flow
We pinpointed this data about the “Fred and Christy effect” as extremely important to students’ decision-making process in enrolling at Prime. We immediately knew we had to break down what this effect exactly meant. Some of the identified reasons:
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For some prospects, it’s the first time they are sitting down with real Prime-related people.
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They get to ask questions to a human and get a response that’s relevant and tailored to their specific needs and wants. Not an FAQ list.
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They get to see the space, community, and atmosphere.
All of these attributes about the Fred and Christy effect are not specific to the individuals exclusively. They are both wonderful people and are amazing at their job, but we can offer these opportunities for applicants earlier on in the process and provide transparency that a website can’t hope to match.
Wireframes
I identified this information mismatch with the users being redirected from ads and the returning/referred users to the Prime website described earlier in the case study. I drafted up a wireframe of a landing page for traffic that was redirected from an external website (ads specifically) focusing on what these types of users are looking for as they are not invested in the Prime brand. My wireframe landing page gives fast, high-level information geared towards people who might click away in five seconds. It attempts to leverage elements of the Fred and Christy effect to showcase the Prime experience more accurately than the current landing page.
One other wireframe I made was designed to streamline how potential applicants RSVP and get reminders for future Prime events such as campus tours, workshops on relevant material, and speeches from students and guest speakers at Prime. The current method uses Meetup.com and forces potential applicants to leave the site and make an account, understand their website, and find the event to RSVP again. I researched the Meetup.com API and found it was possible to embed a calendar directly into the Prime website. This is not a disruptive change as it allows for the Prime event presence to continue to exist on Meetup.com but also allows users to circumvent the need to create an account and simply add the event to their Google calendar if they wish.
Solutions
Prime is a growing business and has gone through a location upgrade to expand. They are doing so many things right. My job as an external critic is not to change for the sake of changing but to make recommendations that build on the business’s strengths.
Reflection
This Prime redesign was a very different sort of project as Prime is already an established start up with large amounts of growth in the past few years. It showcased very well but not all websites’ methods and techniques need to be changed in order to show a distinct growth. Using the smallest brush to make changes goes a long way with established startups and organizations; there's a reason why many of these existing the business already thrive.