1
2
3
4
5
Melissa Garlington
Melissa Garlington
ROLE: Web Design, UX & UI
Dublin Business School (DBS) is an independent third-level college in Ireland offering undergraduate, postgraduate and professional degree courses in Dublin City.
Our task as an agency was to re-brand the whole website and also to improve the overall user experience when trying to find courses.
1. IMPROVING THE USER EXPERIENCE
When looking at the college's previous website, our first impression was that the background was more dominant than the actual content in the foreground. Overall it felt noisy and cluttered, with no real objective or clear direction. Plus the fact that the background was showcasing one Dublin City's main bridges suggested that this could be a tourist site instead of a college.
A second element was the lack of student presence. There were no testimonials, no student faces, or at least a peek inside the facilities. It was clear that a student who takes their future seriously would not feel compelled to even apply to this college.
I focused in improving the overall User Experience of the site by making the following changes:
• Making clever use of colour in the CTAs, my main aim was that students would be interested in clicking the 'Apply' button on the top right hand side or alternatively 'Find a course' button.
• The second consideration was to make a visible search tool on the landing page for finding a specific course.
• I also focused in the grid system in order to make sure that it would work well on mobile.
• Finally, I made sure that the overall description for the course could feel relevant and enticing for the student to just click on 'apply'.
CONCLUSION
Although the design was celebrated by the client, we realised soon enough that by not having control on the developing stages we couldn't guarantee the quality and fidelity of the site to what was originally proposed. The key lesson was to have arranged a few meetings with the developer team to follow through the entire process until completion. The new website has significantly improved students' perception around the quality of the college and the content they have to offer.