Monash Open Day
The opportunity: To create the ultimate day planning tool for prospective students. Monash wanted to drive registration and attendance
while creating a user-centric experience for students to help them navigate the day’s events.
The challenge: University Open Days can be a hectic and competitive experience for prospective students and their parents. Given the domestic and international audiences, we needed to create a very personalised and simplified device-agnostic solution that would help students quickly and efficiently populate their day with event details relevant to them. We wanted students to access event and location information seamlessly, while also making their experience enjoyable.
The approach:
- We started with a competitor review for Open day experiences and filled our knowledge gap with recruitment staff member interviews at Monash.
- Multiple iterative sketching sessions were held to ideate key features such as the day planning calendar interface, event listing page and a navigational framework that would work well particularly on mobile devices.
- Guerrilla hallway testing with actual students was conducted on the various concepts that came out of ideation.
- A clean, modern, user interface was applied, with close attention paid to the Monash brand.
Features based on user research:
- 500 activities across three days were organised, with rich filtering functionality, allowing users to browse and quickly drill down to their relevant interests and study areas.
- Users could seamlessly add/remove activities to their day planner.
- Users had global access to the day planner from anywhere on the site and could view their plan with custom calendar or listing views.
- Activities were clearly displayed on the calendar, and also appeared as a list below the calendar view, with real-time updates on the next upcoming event or activity.
The outcome:
- The Open Day website attracted more than 100,000 hits in the lead up to the event (up from 70,000 in the previous year).
- Open Day videos received more than 210,000 views.
“This year’s Open Day weekend was the most successful in Monash University’s history.” - Margaret Gardner AO, President and Vice-Chancellor