Five Questions for University UX Professionals

Summary: Prospective university students decide whether to apply to a school based on a few basic questions. They expect university websites and advertisements to be personalized to their needs and questions.

Have you ever attended a university? Almost everyone reading this article will have some experience applying to, attending, or trying to graduate from a higher-education institution of some kind. Hopefully, it was (or is currently) a positive experience overall. However, in many cases, the college journey has plenty of challenges — the first of which is simply applying to the right schools.

The primary target audience of most university websites is still made of prospective students — at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. As we gathered data to update our report on good university-website design , many well-known findings describing the experience of prospective university students reemerged. We also discovered new insights reflecting the ever-changing state of higher education —particularly in response to COVID-19.

This article presents five major insights drawn from the many new findings added to the report and focuses on prospective university-students’ experience. Each insight is posed below as a question that UX professionals in higher education might ask themselves to determine whether they have adequately accommodated the corresponding user need in their work.