Portfolio
Delivering actionable insights through competitive research
University
Overview
The client, a leading university in New Zealand, wanted an evaluation of their website in comparison to their competitors. As they were transitioning to a new CMS platform, they wanted external insights on what additional improvements could be made based on competitor analysis.
Background
Previously, the university had worked with another agency that delivered a heuristic analysis and competitor review, which were considered non-replicable and provided only a partial evaluation of the website.
The main stakeholder also highlighted a key challenge: the misalignment among diverse departments, including representatives for the Māori and Pacific students, faculty representatives, marketing, and engineering. Aligning these groups was crucial to define priorities to evaluate the website and ensure it represented all interests.
Challenges
Align stakeholders to define the evaluation criteria.
Define a framework that delivers a competitive analysis of the website experience.
Work efficiently to deliver within the project budget.
Understand the tertiary education sector in New Zealand
Project phases
The project was divided in 5 stages:
Understand the industry
Stakeholder alignment
Develop framework
Collect data
Analyse and present findings
Understanding the Industry
The first step was immersing myself in the tertiary education sector in New Zealand. The client shared critical documents, including their digital strategy, market research, Google Analytics data, and user personas. This helped me understand their positioning and the competitive landscape, recognizing the website as a key touchpoint for attracting students and researchers.
Aligning Stakeholder Priorities
The client’s stakeholders represented a wide range of interests—spanning marketing, admissions, and faculty. Aligning their priorities was crucial for a successful evaluation.
To streamline the process, I created a poll-based prioritisation exercise that allowed stakeholders to rank key business goals, target audiences, and website tasks. This approach maximised the efficiency of the following alignment workshop, which was held virtually using Miro.
The workshop not only generated valuable discussions for the project's outcome but also fostered internal alignment.
Miro board used for the Stakeholder workshop
Developing a Comprehensive Evaluation Framework
Navigation
This factor examines how easy it is to access the page with the information necessary to complete the task.
Language
This aspect highlights whether the language was appropriate for the audience.
Look and feel
This aspect assesses the use of visual elements like photographs, diagrams, maps, tables and how they contribute to the page's clarity.
Information Architecture
This factor evaluates the layout of the page and how challenging it is to locate and understand the displayed information.
Task completion
The final score shows the easiness of completing the task on both mobile and desktop
Collecting data
The data collection involved following user stories on both the mobile and desktop versions, spending approximately 15 minutes on each. I captured screenshots, documented each step, and provided detailed descriptions of the user experience, evaluating how effectively users completed tasks and identifying key factors that contributed to any failures.
Analysing and presenting findings
Since the user stories were already segmented by phases of the user journey, it became easier to identify where the website was falling short compared to its competitors. Analysing the raw data enabled us to highlight the best and worst aspects of each phase.
The report not only included clear, actionable insights outlining specific improvements based on competitor strengths and weaknesses, but it also emphasised high-impact changes such as enhancing navigation, improving language clarity, and ensuring the website resonates with students.
In addition to these findings, we delivered extensive documentation and training for the internal UX team, enabling them to replicate the evaluation process in the future.
Graph showing how local competitors compare in each stage of the student journey
Example of actionable insight for consideration phase of the student journey
Graph showing overall score for each audience
Deliveries
Replicable competitor evaluation framework
Actionable insights for each stage of the user journey
Documentation and training for the internal UX team
Key learnings
Alignment Among Stakeholders is Essential: Achieving consensus among diverse stakeholders is crucial for the success of any project. It ensures that all perspectives are considered and that the final outcome reflects the collective goals of the organisation.
Understanding Users Through Competitor Analysis: Observing competitors' movements can provide valuable insights into user behaviour and preferences.
Complexity of Data Visualization: Working with graphs that contain multiple sources of information can be challenging. The graphs required several iterations to get to a clear and understandable state.
Understanding different evaluation methodologies: Developing a new framework required a deep understanding of users through desk research, as well as knowledge of various evaluation methodologies. This approach ensured that the framework was comprehensive and provided a clear comparison of competitors, along with actionable outcomes for next steps.