NapierENU Internship: Conversion UX, Content Structure & Service Journeys

Across key journeys, users faced unnecessary cognitive load and avoidable friction: long pages with repeated or unclear links, inconsistent calls to action, and booking paths that required too many steps or introduced trust breaks at checkout. These issues made it harder for users to complete tasks quickly and confidently, whether booking a short course, navigating student services, or onboarding as a member of staff.

The work had three stated goals:

1. Goal 01

   Reduce friction in key journeys by simplifying navigation, calls to action and content structure across priority pages.

2. Goal 02

   Turn observations into evidence through competitor benchmarks, click-paths and documented decision points.

3. Goal 03

   Enable implementation with prioritised recommendations and redesign concepts aligned to Napier’s design system and accessibility standards.

I reviewed key MyNapier student portal pages to identify usability and content-structure issues that increase time-to-task. I documented friction points, prioritised changes, and produced redesign concepts that improve hierarchy, scanability, and consistency across pages, supporting intuitive navigation for common student tasks.

• Mapped common user intentions per page: what users come there to do.
• Audited layout consistency, content grouping and call-to-action clarity.
• Produced redesign concepts with improved hierarchy and predictable patterns.

The source lists UX review boards and redesign concepts for the Homepage, “Your Studies” and “Money” pages.

I mapped the student internship journey as a decision-flow (not a linear path) to reveal where students experience uncertainty, loops, and handoff friction. This made the journey discussable with stakeholders and created a clear foundation for targeted improvements in information, ownership, and onboarding expectations.

• Clarified stages, handoffs and the unknowns students face.
• Highlighted drop-off risk points driven by missing or unclear information.
• Created a shared artefact for prioritising fixes and improving onboarding consistency.

The published map describes frequent loops around fragmented information, unclear ownership at handoffs and poor status visibility. These are risks identified in the source artefact, not measured dropout results.

To understand what an intuitive booking process looks like in short course conversion UX, I benchmarked leading universities and mapped booking flows, CTA patterns, content structure, and checkout/payment behaviour. This created an evidence base for what to change at Napier and what not to copy.

• Booking flows varied in effort; some required double-digit steps to reach payment.
• CTA visibility and placement affected momentum through the journey.
• Third-party checkout could introduce a trust break where continuity and reassurance were weak.
• Course price, date, duration and location helped people decide quickly.

Using the benchmark insights, I redesigned the “Student Stories” experience and its integration into course pages to support decision-making. The goal wasn’t to create more content, it was to structure social proof so it reduces uncertainty at the moment users are considering “Apply” or “Contact admissions”.

• Created a story template with sections and anchors so users can scan, not scroll.
• Introduced “Questions from students” to address common objections in context.
• Improved discovery via a central listing page with search/filter and meaningful tags.
• Embedded Student Stories into course pages to support decision-making at the relevant point in the journey.

The archived media set does not identify a specific Student Stories redesign screenshot, so no unrelated image is presented as evidence for this workstream.

I audited the “Guide for new staff” intranet content via a content inventory and link review, identifying broken and duplicated links, unclear destinations, and repeated calls to action. A key issue was that induction guidance was largely delivered as a PDF, which reduced scanability, discoverability, and accessibility.

I translated the PDF content into a structured, live induction page so new staff could self-serve through clear, task-based steps. The redesigned structure followed the Design Hub patterns to maintain consistency with the staff intranet UI and improve accessibility, navigation clarity, and confidence in next steps.

• Recommended replacing PDF-first induction with a live “Staff Induction” hub.
• Proposed task-based categories: Access, Devices, Accounts, Collaboration, Software, Storage and Printing.
• Recommended task-first CTA labels, a single “Start here” pathway, reliable deep links and removal of repeated calls to action.

The source audit did not identify a locally available screenshot of the intranet audit or proposed induction-page artefact; no substitute visual is presented here.

The internship’s listed outputs were UX review boards and redesign concepts, a student internship journey map, a short-course competitor benchmark and prioritisation, a Student Stories redesign direction, and an intranet content/link audit with an induction information architecture proposal.

The original case study says the work translated observations into recommendations and redesign concepts. It does not confirm that these recommendations shipped or provide post-launch measures, so no implementation or performance result is claimed here.

“The biggest shift was realising that ‘UX problems’ in universities are often service problems in disguise: content ownership is distributed, systems are legacy, and journeys cross multiple teams.”

Reflection from the original Napier case study.

It concludes with an interest in designing end-to-end journeys across web, intranet and operational processes, and improving content governance so experiences stay consistent after launch.

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