The government changed the rules. The website had to change with them.
The Open University had built their entire sales model around selling individual modules. Then the government stopped subsidising them the same way, student loans entered the picture, and suddenly the OU needed to sell degrees instead. Same product, different structure, entirely different front end. Oh, and could we cut the time to convert from two years to something more reasonable?
The problem
Selling degrees is not the same as selling modules. The website had no idea.
To access a student loan, a prospective student had to be enrolling on a degree. That meant the OU needed to present their courses differently, price them differently, and guide people through a decision that was now significantly more complex and significantly more consequential. The existing website wasn't built for any of that.
Two years was also far too long to convert a prospective student into an enrolled one. People were interested, then they were gone. The gap between intent and action needed closing.
The brief was to redesign the website from the ground up, built around how real people actually made this decision, and get conversion time down.
The work
"What, even me?" Yes. Especially you.
The work started with the users, which is where it always should. Over nine months, the team carried out 250 hours of user research and usability testing. On most days of testing, at least one person cried. Not because anything went wrong. Because something went right.
The OU is open to everyone, including people who did badly at school, people who never sat A-levels, people who had been told for years that a degree wasn't for them. When those people sat in the testing sessions and realised, really understood, that the OU meant them too, the question would come: "What, even me?" And the answer was always the same: yes, especially you. Never underestimate the value of actually talking to your users.
In return, they told us what they needed from the website: honesty about what studying for a degree with the OU would actually be like. Clear language. No false promises. A guide through a big decision, not a sales funnel.
That's what we built.
Time to convert dropped from two years to six months.
Then something unexpected happened
Converting faster created a problem nobody saw coming.
Eighteen months later, there was a return visit. The conversion improvement had worked almost too well. Students were enrolling faster than before, but some of them weren't ready for the pace and demands of studying. Drop-out rates had crept up. The website was converting people before they'd had enough time to properly understand what they were signing up for.
The fix was counterintuitive: introduce a little more friction. Not enough to put people off, just enough to make sure they were going in with their eyes open. It's a detail worth knowing, because it's now something that gets factored in from the start whenever conversion speed is part of the brief. Going fast isn't always the goal. Going fast with the right people is.
Sound familiar?
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