ABOUT

As a leading British institute for further education, the University of Bath selected AD for the redesign of 20 new pages for it’s three main faculties - science, humanities and social sciences and engineering and design. With each department operating as it’s own entity, our main aim through the design was to portray the individualistic nature of each of the departments.

Key challenges of the project included integrating with the university branding, developing a more distinct area for each department which would in turn better meet the needs of the user.

To begin with, our strategic experts researched the faculties from peer universities identifying unique elements and pros and cons of other designs across the education sector. Simply analysing one university was not enough and as each course has its own unique character, it was essential to research a multitude of universities targeting the same demographic.

Following this, our stakeholder research involved both extensive surveys and face to face interviews with up to 30 stakeholders. These insights allowed us to establish key objectives and advise on user journeys moving forward.

Having an excellently designed website is all well and good however it is essential to get users to the site to begin with. As such, research into how the user arrives at the University website was conducted including search terms, behaviours and key user journeys as well as how users navigate the existing site. In doing so, this research allowed us to provide recommendations for how the University can better facilitate users in achieving their goals.

Distinguishing a different colour theme for each department, a colour palette was defined for the university as a whole to ensure consistency whilst maintaining unique elements for each department. Creating a module library, this not only allowed the university to construct their own individual pages but provides a bank of resources with the ability of combining these in countless different ways to produce a variety of results according the each departments different needs. Having modules designed with customisable functionality allows the University to manipulate the information displayed within the charts and graphs.

“Full of ideas and having a very positive attitude towards the challenges of designing for Higher Education, AD has produced fantastic results. The creative team assigned to our project, was easy to work with and produced an attractive design that not only complimented and adhered to our existing Visual Identity, but also enhanced several areas of the user experience.”