Athens State Online: A Microsite Built for Graduate Enrollment

The Challenge

Athens State had expanded its online program offerings, but getting viable prospects for enrollment was lagging behind capacity. Due to limited institutional resources, this university hired our team to audit its marketing-to-application process and implement strategies to increase applications for the five enrollment segments.

Project Overview

I was the sole UX practitioner and personally performed all UX phases, with final sign-off from the account owner. Creative, SEO, content, campaign and engineering work remained part of cross-functional delivery. The engagement covered a microsite and landing pages using the existing university brand to help online degree seekers request more information on a subset of programs. This submission would begin a journey for the seeker through our nurturing, enrollment, and retention programs, which assist degree-seeking users through their discovery and enrollment stages.

Key to the success of this project would be a content-rich website for the user to engage with to gather information on the program of interest. Crafting the site in a way that would rank high on organic searches based on program keywords would also be key. The new site had to look as close to the parent site as possible to avoid too much dissonance and erosion of confidence if the two sites looked to be from different sources.

Journey Map

To better understand the challenges the client faced with enrolling in their online degree programs, I used personas developed by the Audience Intelligence team to recruit and interview possible users who aligned with these personas. The interview asked a variety of questions based on the type of activities they would do if they were seeking online degree programs.

From these findings, I developed user journey maps to identify areas of negative response, areas we could focus our efforts on with our new web properties to mitigate the seeker’s barriers to submitting an application.

Information Architecture

The microsite’s structure was unbalanced. The programs section had a deeply nested information architecture, while the supporting top-level sections were flat. I collaborated closely with the SEO team on an architecture intended to help users find program information and support discovery through program-related searches. That was a design objective, not a verified search-ranking result.

A secondary challenge was that the university was to manage a number of the online programs. This meant we had to link back to the parent site on some of the programs and link to our site on others. To the user, there needed to be as little visual difference between the two types of programs as possible.

Wireframes

Focusing on the areas of opportunity identified in the journey maps, aligning with the business requirements, and using the content strategy outlines for each page, I utilized user experience patterns and principles to build a flow highlighting the key actions the user would take on a given page. The wireframes would be used in low-fidelity usability testing to ensure we were getting the expected behaviors and discover any new barriers to the user completing the task.

Accessibility evaluation primarily used Lighthouse and manual code checks. These were accessibility practices, not an independently audited WCAG conformance finding. Separate multivariate and A/B tests varied messages and information priority within the same ad campaign. I referred to the tool as “Google Tag manager 4”; its product/version interpretation and exact test configuration are not established here.

Conclusion

The shipped deliverables included the online-degree microsite, landing pages using Contentful, and a blog using WordPress. I completed the UX work; these CMS mappings do not establish that I coded or implemented the production sites.

The microsite launched in summer 2021 alongside coordinated marketing and enrollment work. During my tenure, quarterly Academic Enrollment business numbers and product-management GTM click-through/conversion tracking informed a reported 20% enrollment increase in selected struggling programs, primarily graduate management. The report does not isolate UX’s contribution. Exact cohorts, denominators and comparison periods were not supplied, and the underlying data have not been independently verified.

The account from my tenure described a phase 2 refresh informed by the first six months of findings. Its completion and the client’s later status are unknown to me.