Meet Stutern - a skills development and job placement platform that trains and connects young African talents with long-term employment. Over the years, its Graduate Accelerator has evolved into becoming one of Nigeria’s most revered skills development platform, enabling people land their dream jobs in the tech labour market.

Desired project outcomes

• Increase the number of learners that enrolled for the courses on the site
• Homogenise the brand and maintain consistency across a number of platforms (website, newsletters, social media, pitch decks, etc)

I worked as a UI/UX designer on this project, coming up with the design for the responsive website, conducting UX research and testing. Occasionally, I also helped with digital marketing. I was privileged to work with team members that brought a wealth of knowledge to the table and had so much useful input to provide from their respective domains.

Research: The Edtech Industry

Stutern’s services had evolved over time, but understandably - the site had not. The lean (and extremely busy) team prioritized the wellbeing, development and success of their learners above everything else. A look at their Trello boards, and I was in awe of how much work they churned out.

I began by evaluating the edtech industry. What companies are in the market? What courses do they offer? What are their business models? It was an interesting starting point that provided a lot of perspective and context.

After that I went on to perform a thorough analysis of the website, exploring what existed and where there was room for further development.

Observations

• The only description for the courses were the short subsections on the homepage. I found that people who were looking to get into tech but did not understand the landscape had a hard time trying to select which was best suited to their interests.
• It was challenging to find information about the course structures, or how the program ran. How long do the classes last for? What is the entire program breakdown like?
• Information about payment was included as body text within a section of the application form. A lot of users missed this. Customer Support noted this as one of the top inquiries from learners.
• There were also some inconsistencies with brand application. Font and colour varied across a number of pages.

Problem Definition

The site did not have the information that prospective learners needed to make their application process fast and seamless.

Use Cases

I interviewed 18 people, ranging from people who had no prior knowledge of how Stutern worked to users who had already enrolled for one of their programs. I also interviewed staff responsible for responding to email and phonecall enquiries, as well as staff who had worked on managing previous cohorts the company had trained. With the information gathered, I was able to define relevant personas.

Feature Narrative

To create an experience that makes it easy for prospective learners to choose a course of study and apply for this course easily. The key elements to achieve these are:

• Understanding the Program: Information is provided about what the program is, and how the core structure of the program runs.
• Choosing a Course: Broad course descriptions are provided with curriculum and timetable to enable users make more informed decisions.
• Payment Plans: Users can view and compare available options on how to pay for the courses.
• Application Process: Let users know how the application process is supposed to go.
• FAQs: Users come here to see Frequently Asked Questions. Questions and responses are grouped into categories for easy reference.

Homepage

I spent a lot of time designing this page because the old site had a high bounce rate and it was important we worked on getting the percentage down. From the conversations we had had with learners (current & prospective), it was clear what their driving forces where and we did our best to appeal to those needs.

Other Pages

Social Media

I had to combine some graphic design and marketing skills to increase traffic and help push the number of applications for the upcoming cohort. I used my graphic design skills to create pages & posts that would appeal to our target audience and used my experience with marketing to determine what content was appropriate and supported how the company wanted to position itself.

Final Notes

All in all, I really enjoyed working with the team and doing impactful work. The engagement on the support lines reduced drastically as prospective learners had most of the information they needed to make their decisions. Average weekly phone calls dropped by about 60% while emails dropped by 74%! To see the impact of how proper information presentation helps business operations in real life was very rewarding.