Everything else
Digital product
I’ve worked closely with multidisciplinary teams to develop successful digital products and tools, from discovery through to launch.
This has involved:
writing UX copy
collaborating in ideation, testing and research sessions
leading user acceptance testing
benchmarking and evaluating performance
Below are a few projects that I’ve worked on.
Destination guides
Which? University
A series of immersive location hub pages to give prospective students a taste of life in the UK's most popular university cities.
Pages combined original and curated content with in-house and third party data such as:
city trivia
tips for nightlife and things to do
student-generated quotes and imagery
local area information
an interactive map
By capturing search traffic for location-based searches, we drove users to related course and university profiles. This expanded our offering and provided users with a new entry point into their university research with us.
After the Which? University website closed down, these guides were picked up by UCAS where I was involved in updating and expanding these: https://www.ucas.com/city-guides
Student budget calculator
Which? University
A calculator tool to help students and their families budget for living costs at university - a significant pain point for this audience.
Users simply select their university and the tool gives them a categorised breakdown of rough living costs. They can personalise these and read related advice (previously users could download their breakdown and sign up to receive tailored communications too).
The tool is powered by a number of data points, including student spending data (Office for National Statistics), student halls data (Which?), and private rental data (SpareRoom).
Results (as of Spring 2019)
93,000+ tool searches (including repeat uses)
12,000+ users downloaded their breakdown
high satisfaction rate among students (80%) and parents (79%)
While the Which? University website has since closed down, the tool is still live on the Which? Money website: https://www.which.co.uk/money/university-and-student-finance/student-budget-calculator
Course search and profile redesign
Which? University
The website’s core search helped users find, compare, and shortlist over 30,000 undergraduate courses in the UK.
As part of this redesign, we wanted to review the content hierarchy, optimise onward journeys, incorporate new datasets, and refresh the interface.
The new profiles displayed:
entry requirements
tuition fees
modules
student demo data and ratings
employment outcomes
Users could compare these metrics across courses using high/med/low indications. They could quickly browse similar courses (e.g. same course at a nearby uni, joint course at the same uni) too.
The course search was powered by a number of datasets from universities and colleges, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, and Which? University's annual student survey.
Results (as of Spring 2019):
bounce rate down -44.78%
pages per session up +33.14%
dwell time up +28.7%
You can find a version of the search tool and course profiles on the The Uni Guide website. This is managed by The Student Room following the closure of Which? University.
Alex and Jasmine’s ‘Wedsite’
This was a personal project to create a website where wedding guests could quickly RSVP and find all the information they needed to avoid the couple receiving unnecessary messages. I was really pleased to help my friends while this was also an opportunity to design content in a completely new area.
Highlights:
prominent CTA buttons to RSVP above the fold and in the main navigation
homepage content ordered to prioritise details that guests would need to check before or on the day (e.g. date, timings, venue info)
an FAQ-style ‘Have a question?’ page broken down into sensible categories (i.e. COVID, before, during and after the day) to cover key information and typical wedding questions (based on brief desktop research)
a simple URL that was easy to remember (alexjasminewedding.com)
a short message from the couple in the meta description which pulled through when the website link was shared via Whatsapp etc.
Social media management
Role: grew social audiences on established platforms with inventive social-first content, driving forward new platforms and managing daily activity (including storyboarding content and interacting with followers).
You can browse a selection of video and image assets that I’ve produced for social, plus examples of copywriting for social.
Key achievements: grew Twitter and Facebook audiences (+83% and +36% respectively), plus pushed forward the organisation's first Snapchat channel (for Which? University).
Email marketing
Role: guided email strategy across multiple audiences to deliver advice and tools at key moments, plus writing, proofing and scheduling sends.
Key achievements: regular communications regularly achieved open and click-to-open rates well above average for both the organisation and sector, hitting highs of 49% and 79% respectively (for Which? University).
Search engine optimisation
Role: utilised in-house expertise and tools to ensure new products and content were optimised for target keywords (including mobile users), progressing technical and content recommendations with relevant teams, and liaising with agencies on link building efforts.
Key achievements: grew organic traffic +16% and featured SERP snippets +672%, with subsequent uplifts across other KPIs (for Which? University).
PPC and paid display advertising
Role: briefing agencies on upcoming activity, generating creative (including copywriting), proofing campaigns prior to going live, defining reporting, benchmarking performance, optimising campaigns and interrogating reports.
Key achievements: grew PPC traffic and paid display traffic YoY +54% and +48% respectively (for Which? University).