LASALLE College of the Arts - UX Workshop
Overview
Conduct a UX-focused audit and hands-on workshops to uncover user needs, pain points, and institutional goals, then use those insights to guide a future redesign of LASALLE College of the Arts’ website.
Pre-workshop Research
Before conducting workshops, we start building context and analyse other competitors.
"What are other schools doing better? What do users actually do on LASALLE’s site?"
We focused on the 4 main benchmarked art college : UAL (UK), NAFA (SG), SOTA (SG), RCA (UK)
LASALLE has a strong brand, but the website struggles with key UX issues:
- Navigation is complex and hard to follow
- Content structure is inconsistent across sections
- The energy of campus life isn’t captured in a way that engages future students
Analytics Key Insights
To find out the LASALLE’s digital presence, we looked into recent Google Analytics data. Here are some of the summary we got from the insights,
Singapore is dominant with 59% of overall traffic
Mobile sessions range from 32-62%, suggesting a mobile-first approach
Desktop users tend to have longer engagements (with session durations of 4+ minutes).
Organic search is the primary traffic source
Homepage consistently top page and strong interest in BA programme pages
Internal Stakeholder Session
Our objective was to understand LASALLE's institutional vision, operational needs, and key challenges from staff perspectives. With the support of the LASALLE project team, 4 focus groups sessions were planned and conducted over two days, 22 October 2024 and 14 November 2024 with 24 participants.
Each group was facilitated by 1 facilitator partnered with a notetaker. Each groups’ participants were also represented by staff from divisions that had responsibilities or interactions with the specific journey and portion of the site.
Asking the right questions is critical. By using user journeys and phases, we guided stakeholders with tailored prompts to review the current site, discover their goals and needs.
After identifying their pain points,, we brought everyone together to brainstorm ideas for the new LASALLE website redesign. During this session, we learned the current struggles and priorities clearly. This gave us a clear direction to move forward.
External Focused Group Session
Following internal sessions, we conducted with actual users and gather feedbacks about their experiences with LASALLE's website. It was 95-min session with 6 participants. We recruited a diverse group of participants profiles such Senior, Working Professional, Unemployed and Youth.
Key Insights
After the workshops sessions, we consolidated insights to identify the opportunities to improve the experience. Four core UX challenges they are facing include:
Navigation
Users struggled to find programs, scholarships, and key pages.
Content
The information hierarchy was confusing and buried critical details.
Mobile usability
Excessive scrolling and poor responsiveness.
Hidden CTAs
Calls-to-action were hard to locate, leading to missed enrolment opportunities.
Next step, we've prepared a UX report. The report includes a clear mapping of identified issues to our recommended solutions.
Impact and Key Takeaway
A key challenge in the LASALLE workshop was managing discussions, as stakeholders often moved beyond the planned topics.
This also led to useful input, surfacing different views and accessibility needs we might have missed. The report from these workshops now provides a solid base for the next design phase.
