The Context
FGV is short for Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a not for profit private education institution established in 1944. However, being traditional doesn't mean being slow-moving. FGV has always been enthusiastic about embracing new technologies and a pioneer in the field of distance learning in Brazil, and with a growing portfolio of courses, FGV kept a steady flow of always-on campaigns to attract new students.
The Problem
The problem is that those campaigns stopped converting, or so we were led to think. And we were given a very simple task: to come up with ideas to generate more traffic, conversions and online applications via FGV's website.
Known Issues
FGV is composed of 10 different schools, and each of them has full administrative autonomy, which, to the user side, translated into a different website for each school, different experiences of use, different campaigns, which made impossible to track user journeys.
Some websites were more user friendly, some were less, but all of them had one thing in common: they were not mobile-ready.
Data & Theories
Since tracking user journeys where out of question, the only data we had were raw analytics numbers. We also managed to talk with a few users about their problems visiting FGV's site, and with that in hand we started to formulate hypotheses.
The first data we looked into was the campaigns' click through rate, to check if descending conversion rates and campaigns were related. Turns out that our CTR for display ads were 3 times higher than the average, so campaigns were being effective.
The we looked at both bounce and exit races, both overall and for specifics courses pages that had ads directing users to them. Both were way higher than expected, and we started to think it was a user experience problem, which was confirmed by the users that we talked to.
User Pains
Users pointed out that the websites were confusing, lacking a standard of navigation patterns. Information finding was especially difficult, and users were left to wander the site in hopes of landing where they wanted.
Key pieces of information to drive conversion, such as cost, location and duration, were not highlighted properly. Course descriptions were confusing, and courses from different schools sometimes seemed to overlap, which made users unsure about choosing the right course and committing to a high investment of money and time.
The (Obvious) Solution
The first and most obvious solution was to rework FGV's entire online experience into a more straightforward journey, standardized sites for each schools, responsive and mobile-ready.
Unfortunately, that was entirely out of the scope of work the agency developed to the client. Lack of expertise, budget and time forced us to think other possibilities.
How could we solve a UX problem without actually improving usability on the sites?
The Not-So-Obvious Solution
Instead of creating endless campaigns that ended up making the user wander the site, what if we simply delivered them the most suitable course for each one?
And how would that recommendation work? Looking at what drives user decision in this case, we found five drivers: course duration, total investment, location (in person or online), occupation area and education level.
Course duration and investment were information that came from FGV, the others had to come from the user.
And to take away some friction on the process, how could we pull the other data in a not-boring, prone to abandonment way?
We established a partnership with LinkedIn to create a course recommendation algorithm for a web-based app. Users connected their LinkedIn accounts, inserted a few preferences (that worked as filters) and this data was them crossed with FGV course database.
This way we created a shortcut between prospect students and their possible matches in courses, bypassing all the user experience issues that we weren't able to tackle.
