Website Adoption for Downing Students
- Website Adoption to enhance the user journey with a focus on Content Design.
- User journey mapping to identify the opportunities digital presents for Downing Student’s overall business objectives.
- Added CMS functionality for Downing Student’s marketing team.
The Ambition
Downing Students is a distinguished provider of student accommodation, offering over 8,000 beds across 10 of the UK's foremost university cities.
The Downing Students’ marketing team wanted to enhance the user experience for students searching for accommodation to increase direct bookings and encourage word-of-mouth marketing. Their previous website lacked certain functionality and design elements that were hindering the marketing team’s ability to achieve this.
What we did
Enhanced user journeys
Before starting any development work, we reviewed the previous user journey for the Downing Students website and identified opportunities for enhancements.
The groundwork for any enhancements considered the identified user journey of first looking at a particular location, then finding a property in their university’s city and finding a room to meet their requirements.
To achieve this distinction, we included a new homepage search panel to direct users to the overall properties available in their university’s city. Once they land on this property results panel, they can filter down the available rooms by academic year, room type, price and tenancy length.
![Enhanced user journeys image]()
![Designing efficient content image]()
Designing efficient content
Following the user journey audit, we identified what information needs to be presented to the target audience.
Working collaboratively with the Downing marketing team, we added relevant information to the property search results listings such as the exact location details, nearby public transport links and information on all attractions close to the property.
In addition, we added clear call-to-actions to signpost users to the next stage of their journey. This included introducing the option to ‘view rooms’ which takes users directly from the property results overview panel to the room results page. The selected search filters are already applied to the room results, removing the need to input their specific criteria again.
![map user journey banner]()
View on map functionality
To further support the user journey and encourage direct bookings, we developed a ‘view property on map’ functionality. When the user selects ‘map view’ in the property search results, they will be able to view the available properties based on their search filtering on an embedded map.
This removes the need for users to exit the Downing website and research the location on another map web application.
![View on map functionality image banner]()
![view on map image banner 2]()
Flexible content management
During the discovery phase, Downing’s marketing team had identified barriers to managing the previous website’s content. To empower the in-house marketing team, we updated and introduced additional CMS functionality to allow the team to have more flexibility around creating and editing content pages and site-specific developments.
![flexible cms]()
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