Challenge

World Strides, a leader in educational travel and study abroad programs, had recently acquired International Studies Abroad (ISA). They needed a digital strategy to guide the redesign of ISA’s primary web presence – StudiesAbroad.com.

World Strides needed a team with UX strategy and service design experience to partner with ISA’s leadership team to review its digital presence, benchmark against competitors, and devise a strategy for the redesign of the StudiesAbroad.com and its digital ecosystem to better align with current trends in international education, the needs of ISA’s target audiences, and its business operation – all in 90 days.

Approach

Experience by Design (EBD) led a series of kickoff meetings with stakeholders and project team members from World Strides and ISA to review goals, align expectations, develop a preliminary work plan, and assign roles and responsibilities for the project.

While the World Strides and ISA teams gathered inputs and resources identified during the kickoff meetings, we reviewed the StudiesAbroad.com website, content, and assets in ISA’s digital ecosystem. We also reviewed analytics and historical usage reports to gauge how the website was being used and how it was performing.

Combining the inputs and resources provided by World Strides and ISA with information and insights gleaned from our review of ISA’s digital ecosystem, and drawing upon good practices from the service design framework, we devised a project plan with the following goals:

• Aligning backstage ISA processes, work streams, and solutions with frontstage target audience needs.
• Creating user-friendly, meaningful, and empathetic experiences for all.
• Identifying touchpoints along the study abroad journey where digital could unify experiences and reduce friction, and improve performance and outcomes.

Discovery kicked off with ISA stakeholder and operations team interviews, competitor reviews, a content inventory, and a sitemap and card sorting study to test a more streamlined organizational structure for the StudiesAbroad.com website. During these activities we continuously:

• Updated and reported findings to the ISA and World Strides teams during daily standups and weekly check-in meetings.
• Solicited informed perspective and insights, critical feedback, and direction from members of the ISA and World Strides teams as needed.

We used the findings and inputs from the activities above to create sketches of the target audience, plan and conduct collaborative work sessions with the ISA team to unpack and map critical user journeys, and design initial concept storyboards for key experiences and features for the new website to guide discussion and maintain alignment along the way.

We documented our findings and recommendations into a series of reports throughout the project, and then consolidated key findings into a Strategy Brief with recommendations for the redesign of the StudiesAbroad.com website and ISA’s digital ecosystem. The Strategy Brief also provided a high-level digital experience roadmap and four key audience journeys for ISA to track to measure and gauge quality and satisfaction across the experience lifecycle.

Result

We helped World Strides and ISA cultivate a shared understanding of the critical experience challenges they needed to address for success, as well as the size and scope of those challenges. By providing strategic recommendations and high-level direction, we focused the design and positioning of StudiesAbroad.com and the other pieces of ISA’s digital presence in ways that would amplify and better align World Strides and ISA’s operational strengths and unique capabilities to the needs of the target audience, and with marketplace opportunities and trends.

List of Services

• Digital Strategy + Service Design
• Project Planning + Management
• Digital Experience Review
• Stakeholder Interviews
• UX + User Research
• Industry + Competitor Research
• Brainstorming + Collaborative Design Workshops
• IA, IxD, UI Design + Content Strategy Concepts