Client
Software University is a modern education center for development specialists, which is constantly growing after its establishment. It is training over 10,000 specialists each year. A clear indicator for their success are the several awards which they’ve won over the last year in the education area, including best educational platform from BWA(Bulgarian Web Awards).
Challenge
The faster your business grows, the quicker it can fall if you don’t know how to manage it. The fast growth and demand for development education forced SoftUni to step back and think how to organize the constantly increasing quantity of information within the website and improve the user experience. They needed a single place to organize the big quantity of different courses, materials, information and events.
In addition, to the website user experience optimization SoftUni wanted to to refresh their brand. They needed a consistent, professional and trustable look as every educational organization, in order to raise their credibility on the market.
Research
The first part of each solution is always to define the problem. As mentioned, the fast growth required a simplified user experience, which to cover all students needs. However, what does “simplified” mean? We’ve made a survey with over a 1000 students to collect their feedback and to define their pains and needs with the current website.
Together with the SoftUni team, we managed to capture the feedback of the regular users of the platform and agree on the most important areas to improve.
Solution
Responsive Website Design
After analyzing the main pains and needs of the users in the website, we have redesigned the website. The main goal was to shorten the distance between students and university and to have a single place, where the users are able to check the different programs, events and materials from their courses. As this information is constantly updated, we focused on the responsive versions of the website as it is clear that the today’s students use their phones a lot and it is important to have all the information about your courses just “in thier pocket”.
Before starting the visual design, we developed on the architecture of the site. We’ve wireframed the 3 different versions of the site – for PC, Tablet and Mobile phone in order to decide how to re-organize the different information within the site on the different devices, based on the user needs.
Comparisment of the old homepage (on the left) and the redesigned and improved homepage (on the right).
Branding
We started the process by identifying and deciding the main recognizable brand elements from their existing brand. Then we refreshed the logo so it reflects the modern look and feel SoftUni was aiming for.
We redesigned all corporate materials, like business cards, different flyers, certificates and diplomas, folders, rollup banners and billboards. To shorten the distance between university and student we produced videos and photos from the education process and added them to the website.
We helped improve and evolve the SoftUni brand by redesigning all their collateral.
