Kelsey E. Staub // Digital Designer
The Marketing Department aimed to deliver a top notch user experience when prospects visited Ashford.edu and was consistently making improvements to the site. In this example, we explored redesigning the RFI form.
The RFI form on Ashford.edu plays a significant role in lead generation and our team was frequently testing ways to improve the conversion rate.
The challenge: create a new experience for the form using the exact same fields that will increase the chance a user submits their contact information.
Users who are interested in learning more about getting an education from Ashford University.
After conducting research of form design and best practices, I started sketching out potential ideas for improving the RFI. Below are a few of those initital sketches.
From my sketches, I took the options that I thought were most viable and mocked them up in Adobe XD. I presented the options to our team and we decided to "go big" and A/B test option 5 because it was the most different from the control.
I successfully created an improved RFI experience by designing a new way to fill out the form which led to higher conversion rates. Looking back I would have liked to conduct some user testing to get feedback before going into A/B testing but was glad that the testing results delivered enough of a bump to signify an improvement.
In an effort to increase the percentage of navigation links pointing to degree pages, our SEO expert recommended reducing the number of links in our mega menus. This would ultimately help to increase conversion rates. Since we were removing links, we also took this as an opportunity to redesign the menus.
Our SEO expert provided the following chart with his recommendation on the links to keep and remove within each drop down. Additionally when removing these links, I was tasked with redesigning the visual appearance of the menus.
The challenge: remove certain text links from each drop down menu and create a cohesive look for each menu.
I first looked at the existing menu design and identified areas for improvement.
After conducting some initial research, I started by rapidly prototyping options leveraging our existing UI library. I had about 20 options and narrowed down to 6 to present to the team.
Here are 6 menu design ideas that were presented to the team.
I presented the options to our team and we collectively decided to proceed with option 6. It is very clean, easy to read and we liked that it leveraged the creative for our new campaign. Next, I provided desktop and mobile mocks to our development team for implementation.
I was able to successfully design and oversee deployment of a new drop-down navigation based on our SEO expert’s recommendation to reduce links to increase conversions. Unfortunately I left the company before I was able to get any stats regarding how well the new design performed. My next step would have been to conduct usability testing.
