The brief was to redesign Student Accommodation to make it more appealing to students, improve the user journey and increase enquiries.
Designing the new website was exciting. First we investigated the brief, understanding the goals and audience in detail. This involved an audit of the existing website, figuring out what elements must be kept, what could be improved upon and what did not work. We held a discovery workshop with TCD staff to understand what the college's own vision of a successful redesign would be.
One of the key things we discovered was that there was a huge amount of information available but it was spread across multiple pages and covered too broad an area. There was one overall rates page that covered every location, every room type and every variation. This meant students had to sift through a lot of irrelevant information to find what was important to them.
Based on our findings we created a userflow and design strategy. Everyone agreed that the key was to ‘Keep it simple. Keep it relevant’. For example: If a student is looking at accommodation for Kavanagh Court they should see information, rates, map, etc. all related to that location and nothing else to cloud their decision making.
The design had to be have impact and confidence yet still fit into the Trinity College global brand. Two design directions were created. The chosen design uses the Trinity College blue heavily and compliments it with white and black. The blue is tied to the college and helps students envisage being part of Trinity, rather than renting a room anywhere.
We crafted the main tagline ‘Modern Student living by Trinity College Dublin’. This is a statement that no other accommodation provider can match. The use of ‘living’ rather than ‘accommodation’ shows people this is about their college life and not just where they lay their head.
