During our recent website redesign we created course detail pages to house descriptions and details on each course offering. While useful, they don’t provide a call to action that students can use to register themselves. They are also not browsable, making it difficult to find a specific course if you don’t know what the title may be.
Classes that don’t have prerequisites can have a simple “Register now” call to action. Courses that are associated with progression in a program need to drive the student to log into their degree plan and register there.
It will also be important to supply a solution that takes SEO into consideration. We will need a solution that will capture search engine traffic for queries such as “sign language class” or “SERV safe certification”.
We have decided to move forward with a solution that will provide a dynamic call to action based on database values. Course pages will be enhanced with a list of class offerings and each class will have its own call to action. If no classes for that course are available for registration, we will display a friendly message driving users to information on registration dates. This project is just beginning, so mockups of the course search and details pages have been created but have not been tested yet.
After hearing about the problem from our Welcome Center staff I did a deeper dive into the incoming queries on the site. It was determined based on our on-site search metrics that approximately 33.8% of our top 200 unanswered keywords were for class-related topics. Since the keyword report was limited to only unanswered keywords, visitors entering those queries received a simple “This content wasn’t found” message.
Once the stakeholder team identifies what information to include on the page, we will write a usability study testing plan. Utilizing the prototype, we will gather data on how students find and register for classes and find any bottlenecks or potential roadblocks. We will also ask open-ended questions to find how often students would use the class search and gauge their experience. Recommended KPIs would be time on task, drop off rates, conversion rates and a System Usability Scale.
A desktop protoype has been built in Figma and has been used to guide discussions with internal stakeholders. Once business goals are aligned we will move on to perfecting the prototypes and set up usability tests.
