Edstart - helping parents manage their education costs

Edstart is Australia’s leading education payment provider, helping Australians manage their school fees and education costs. They offer flexible payment plans to parents and students to help them manage their finances more effectively.

My role

Competitive analysis / heuristic evaluation / customer research / wireframing and prototyping / usability testing / visual design / UI component library

The problem

Edstart was founded in 2016, and the website hadn’t had any significant updates since 2017. From analytics and direct customer feedback the team identified some  issues with the website that needed to be addressed:

  • Failed attempts to use the payment calculator tool - resulting in a drop off in conversion rates for potential customers
  • Low engagement rates on content around the product itself
  • Usability issues with some aspects of the payment calculator and application tools
  • Not understanding how to get started and apply (a significant number of potential customers were calling up just to understand how to do this online).

Gathering data

I started by working to understand customers needs in more depth. By synthesising insights from prior customer feedback surveys and existing personas, I identified the following core user goals and tasks:

Life goals

  • Give my kids the best opportunities through high quality education
  • Get control over our family budget

‍Tasks to complete on the website

  • Understand who Edstart is
  • Understand what they do
  • Get an idea of how Edstart can assist us
  • Understand how much it might cost
  • Apply and set up a payment plan

I undertook a heuristic evaluation of the entire site to dive deeper into the usability, accessibility and wayfinding on the current site. Some key initial findings are annotated below:

Initial findings

Based on the problems identified, I developed some key hypotheses and some testing tasks that we could give participants. The key themes were:

  • Ensuring that participants could access information about who Edstart were and what products they provided easily from the homepage
  • That the quote and application process was seamless and easy to use, and that participants would understand how to complete this process without assistance
  • Participants will understand how to choose between the two edstart products and how to tailor an interest rate by providing more personal details to Edstart

Some wireframes and prototypes developed for testing are outlined below:

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Understanding users

In order to understand the users better, we needed to ensure we tested out our concepts with the right people. We recruited five participants to test with, from a range of backgrounds and ages, all of whom had children in a fee paying school (or who were considering it in the near future).

User testing

After undertaking the testing, I uncovered the following:

What worked well

  • The discoverability of content about Edstart, the product and how to get a quote and apply for the product all tested very well, with no issues identified from any of the participants.
  • The overall flow of the quote and application tool saw no issues from a usability perspective for the majority of participants. The information required and how to navigate the form were straightforward for most.

What still needed work

  • Over half of the participants struggled with discerning the different product options that were available to them. They understood the concept of getting a payment plan for helping with school fees, but were unable to understand the finer details (such as the time period to make payments).
  • This same theme continued through the quote tool. When asked to make a choice about what product option they wanted to get a quote for (Edstart Pay or Edstart Extend), some participants didn’t understand the difference.

Final design

The finalised design considered the insights from the heuristic evaluation as well as insights from the usability testing. The discoverability of product information was addressed by simplifying the product content on the homepage to just one sentence, in more human language. Then we introduced the detail of the product in a separate page, which aids the user by progressively disclosing the content rather than overwhelming them. In terms of the quote and application tool, we reduced confusion by having the user select a product after they have generated an initial quote, then showing both options on a pricing page so that users could make an informed, personalised choice before finalising their application.

Conclusions

The website redesign went live in December 2020, and since then there have been significant improvements in engagement and conversion for Edstart:

  • 51% increase in website traffic in comparison to the same period in 2020
  • 25% drop in bounce rate, with users viewing more pages per session
  • 1.5% increase in visitors obtaining an online quote for the product
  • 2% increase in conversion from those getting an online quote to submitting an application

Prior to wrapping up my engagement with Edstart, I also set up the foundations of a design system in Figma. This included key UI components that have been translated into a javascript component library, as well as usage guidelines for the marketing and engineering teams, so that the website can be continuously improved.

The final website can be found here.