XReality Academy
XReality Academy
Client
UX/UI designer (marketing team)
Role
About the Project
XReality Academy is an online learning platform geared to teaching its students Virtual Reality (VR), Extended Reality (XR), and Augmented Reality (AR) applications. Their goal is to provide fundamental learning concepts to aspiring XR/VR/AR designers looking to enhance their career journeys and specialize in their field of XR. Since the platform launched in 2019, the company is looking to amass more students to their learning platform.
Challenge
Prospective students noted that navigating through the current homepage was challenging and the information they were looking for was hard to find, the marketing UX design team needed to assess how might we enhance their user experience on the landing page and increase the number of students enrolled.
Process Diagram
The process diagram presents an overall guide of the major steps that were taken for this project.
Team Design Assessment
Our team of designers were tasked to update and complete the current home page, and marketing pages that featured the e-learning platform’s highlighted mentors page and their “About us” page. The objective for the team is to make the homepage and existing marketing pages as seamless as possible for the user to be engaged in the information presented, interested in learning more, and have an easy time enrolling in the courses as a student. Since there was a considerable amount of work to be completed by the team, I focused my time on creating elements and components within the landing page that would provide greater ease for students to navigate through and ultimately increase student enrollment.
Previous Homepage design and layout
User testing results
Since we had an existing home page, the team and I conducted a usability test to understand the page’s current strengths, and weaknesses, and what potential students’ pain points were. Below is a compilation of the key findings we gathered from our usability testing and the pain points I directly addressed later on with my design updates.
In order to assess these pain points, I decided to directly address elements of the hero section, refine and add cards that demonstrated past student feedback, and create a price grid so that students would be able to see the prices upfront.
UI Tool Kit
Below is part of the UI tool kit created for the homepage, utilizing the systematic components used throughout the landing page and other student pages, I decided to build new elements that would address the pain points of our users. The tool kit highlights the fonts and skeletal outlines of these new components being created, which focused on changing the hero section, adding a graph that shows our prices upfront, and providing visual illustrations to our learning process.
First Round of Iterations
Roadblocks and Hurdles
While the new design elements were going to address some of the current weaknesses of our landing page, I came across some roadblocks when trying to implement some of my designs. Our team of developers informed us that there would be discrepancies between what my design components were and what they could integrate into the website. Issues with the enroll now button and selecting the financial plans were two specific features that needed modification. I incorporated new visual elements that would make it easier for the developers to integrate into the website without compromising the usability for students.
A/B testing results
After the new design iterations were added to the landing page we asked our users to take an A/B test and compare the features from the previous landing page to the new one that incorporated our new features and updated layouts. 100% of our users who participated in the A/B testing stated that they found the new features and overall landing page to be a significant improvement from the previous page.
Before and After
Before: Hero section
After: Hero section
New elements added: student feedback
New element added: Membership options
Conclusion
What I learned:
Optimizing these key features contributed towards the increase of positive student feedback and at present XReality Academy resulted in seeing a growing number of students subscribing to their services. Our increase in enrollment and social media pages increased and through this experience, I realized how assessing new user interfaces with a team is crucial for the overall design process.
Next steps:
Next steps are going to include adding more up-to-date components on existing marketing pages, and adding new site pages to further maximize student enrollment and subscriptions.
Credits
Special thank you to the amazing team!
Marketing Design Lead
Jasmin Banks
UI Designer
Paulina Tiu
UX Designer
Dolly Yang
UX/UI Designer
Alexia Limon