Together with Push10 and EngineRoom, The American College of Financial Services (The College) embarked on a transformative journey to redefine it’s identity and digital presence across multiple platforms. The resulting deep digital transformation brought The College’s ambitious vision to life in a way that will permeate across the institution for decades to come.
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We modernized the visual identity and reimagined the marketing site to amplify The College’s multi-faceted vision, prioritizing a “self-serve” environment for easier content discovery.
We restructured the Enrollment experience to decrease drop-offs, resulting in more students for The College.
We redesigned the student experience through the My Learning Hub portal to reduce student frustration and relieve support staff.
Our interviews and surveys revealed six broad categories of target audience pain points. These insights guided our user journeys and the resulting content strategy for the new site.
From the outset, the team at The College was interested in increasing user engagement by building a personalized website experience for each visitor. Based on our research, we recommended four main personalization features: a quiz-style tool to help visitors plot their learning journey, a self-select homepage experience, a robust filterable resources library, and an advanced sitewide search.
With a fast approaching Drupal 7 end-of-life date, we helped The College team craft a plan to move to the latest Drupal version and stabilize custom modules for Enrollment and Portal functions. We also conducted a comprehensive technical audit and helped prioritize the right marketing tools for the new site alongside our partners at Engine Room.
The College was maintaining separate web entities for a variety of programs and services. Through our research, we found that these separate sites created a siloed user experience. We recommended folding the eight Centers of Excellence into the main domain in order to help promote stronger brand recognition and drive more effective user journeys.
We built a new visual approach that exudes more vibrancy and humanity. The new brand meets The College’s audiences where they’re at in their learning journey. While maintaining a strong sense of professionalism, we intentionally pushed the identity into the nonprofit world and stepped away from the prior rigid institutional approach.
With a people-centric mission and a focus on education, it was critically important that The College have an ADA compliant website. From video captions to fonts and colors, the new site design had compliance in mind as a core value from the start.
While it was important that the visual identity not stray too far from the legacy of the previous logo, the new direction softened and modernized The College. Monochromatic in its new brand signature blue, the reimagined mark sheds the corporate stiffness and provides a wider appeal and flex in its application.
The written expression of the brand required a consistent, unified voice. We created detailed editorial guidelines to establish rules and offer recommendations for writing on behalf of the brand online. The final guide provides clear and practical direction so that all writers for The College can communicate with one consistent voice on the web.
Smooth scrolling motion effects entice visitors to discover more of the College’s rich content.
With scrolling overlays, clean collapsing footnotes, and color filling graphics, the design team at Push10 found multiple ways to bring The College Strategic Priorities to life.
We restructured the Programs section of the site to allow prospective students to quickly and easily find comprehensive course information and answers to their most common questions. Robust filtering makes it easy to find relevant courses. Then within each course page, an instant breakdown of immediately relevant information like course timing, delivery format, and tuition address the most common student questions while testimonials validate the ROI with social proof.
With a strong foundation of student insights, we designed a new intuitive interface that features better information hierarchy, reduces the support required from internal staff, and ultimately allows students to be more self-sufficient during the enrollment process. Together, these improvements decrease drop-offs and result in more students for The College.
To better serve current students, we gave the student portal a design and UX facelift that better uses design hierarchy and smart UI elements to instruct the visitor’s attention. We created a bolder “dashboard” view, more prominent notification system, and an “up next” view among other structural improvements – all with the aim of reducing student frustration and relieving support staff.
