This is my biggest project to date: a website for a training centre (it's like a school for adults where you can learn certain skills like using Excel or mind-mapping). I was tasked with redesigning it. And, even though it was not planned in the beginning, I ended up developing it almost entirely.

Context

After my first hackathon, one of its jury members offered me an internship at their company — a training centre (it's like a school for adults where you can learn certain skills like using Excel or mind-mapping). Their website was aging and it was up to me to redesign it. I joined them as the only designer.

Home page

Course page

Collecting initial data

I started by looking over the existing website and understanding its structure. I have also spoken to various team members about how they interact with different types of clients (B2B and B2C) and what happens when a user signs up for one of their courses on the website.

I’ve collected feedback from the team on what they would love to see on the new website.

• One of the key takeaways was that our B2B and B2C clients did not go through the same conversion tunnel. In other words, people looking take courses and people looking to arrange a session for other people from their company went through different processes, so we had to account for that.
• Another point was that the current website’s “registration” process was akin to a contact form. People left their coordinates, and then our staff would call them to finalize the process, arrange payment and actually register them in their software. The staff really wanted to have a more modern process where most or all of the steps would be done automatically via the website.

I’ve also talked to people both our clients and people with no connection to the company whatsoever to see how the current website could be improved upon. Some key takeaways were:

• B2C clients did not immediately understand the aforementioned difference between our B2B and B2C formats and had trouble making that choice on our website

• Our homepage was identical to our course catalogue, but with less choices

• The course catalogue menu item was outside the main navigation. While this choice was initially made to attract more attention to that button, in practice this led to the effect similar to “banner blindness”: people ignored the big shiny thing and were frustrated to not find the catalogue in the main navigation.

  

  The most important button, “All courses” (”Toutes les formations”) is outside the main navigation

• The catalogue sections expanded with a rather cool animation. However, I observed that people were quickly growing tired of it when trying to find what they were looking for. Only one section could be expanded at a time, and repeating animations contributed to the tedium of the process.

• Overall, multiple people made comments that the website looked outdated.