University of Roehampton
A mobile-first experience for students who are serial scanners
University of Roehampton
The University of Roehampton has a compelling offering amongst UK universities. It ranks in the top 15% of universities globally, with student satisfaction ratings riding high for undergrads and postgrads alike.
Its location in southwest London makes it appealing for students that want to enjoy the leafy and tranquil campus, but still have easy access to everything the city has to offer.
Our task was to design and build a website that clearly conveyed Roehampton's unique offering to its users. The beautiful parkland campus in the heart of London gives Roehampton a feeling of safety and community, and we wanted the new website to give prospective students a flavour of that campus experience.
Like all universities, ensuring a healthy flow of applications is vitally important to Roehampton, so we knew that student acquisitions would also be the relentless focus of our user experience and design work.
We began by speaking to real-life users of the website and observing them using the existing site, which threw up some fascinating insights.
The way that users scanned and cherry-picked information from the site made it clear to us that the navigation needed to be much clearer, especially on mobile devices.
During the usability testing we observed a particularly interesting 'double-scroll' behaviour, where users would do a very rapid high-level scan of a mobile page to assess whether the subject matter was of interest, followed by a second scroll to pick out the page's key messages. Only if the key messages resonated would they ready the more detailed copy on the page. This insight influenced the content hierarchy on some the site's key pages, like course pages.
Based on the findings of our research and testing, we introduced:
As Optimizely Gold Partners, using Optimizely DXP to bring the UX vision to life was an obvious choice. The flexibility of Optimizely's content authoring tools empowers the Roehampton team to take full control, whilst still keeping the site in line with UX and brand guidelines.
The new website does a fantastic job of communicating Roehampton's campus experience through its design language and use of photography, but even more satisfying is the positive impact the site has had on student acquisition.
Despite the UK's higher education sector suffering from a decrease in demand, Roehampton's 2024 enrolment figures rallied encouragingly.
As we launch into the next phase of optimisation and continuous improvement, we're confident that the site will help boost Roehampton's acquisition figures for 2025 and beyond.
It's a great example of how robust research and design work can provide a competitive advantage, helping Roehampton to buck the downward trend in the HE market.
"I wanted to thank the whole team at Freestyle for delivering the new University of Roehampton website. The whole process, including data insight, project management and support has been exceptional. The creativity and expertise of the team is clear in the new site, and the programme of continuous analysis and improvement established will enable us to build on this. Thank you to the entire Freestyle team!"