Transforming legal education into a modern career partnership
The College of Law is the school of professional practice for lawyers in Australia and New Zealand, servicing over 4,000 students annually, making them the leader in legal education and training for professional practice across Australasia.
Increased competition in the number of colleges offering similar services, as well as a plan to expand into the Asian market, saw the college looking to overhaul their online business model, with a goal of providing a far more tailored product and service offering.
By undertaking deep research into the developing career of a range of legal professionals, we mapped eight pivotal moments in the average lawyer's working life. For example, from student to graduate and from partner to a senior lawyer considering practicing in a different jurisdiction.
We then looked to leverage the extensive marketing suite of the Sitecore platform in order to personalise content for people dependent on the stage of their career e.g. promoting standard CPD training to lawyers at key times of the year and surfacing bridging courses to assist lawyers in obtaining the necessary training to practice in another countries.
"The integration of e-commerce with our student management system was complex but worth the effort. We had online orders on Day 1 which were created seamlessly without any staff intervention required. We look forward to the future development of the sites harnessing the Sitecore platform."
Christine Simmons - Group Marketing Director
Technically sophisticated, the solution seamlessly links the Sitecore CMS, Salesforce and the College’s Learning Management system, Canvas, with single sign on - facilitated by ADFS ensuring a singular experience for the user. U-Commerce has been integrated to facilitate E-Commerce transactions.
The site has driven an increase in online orders from the day of launch and the personalised content only serves to make the site more relevant to each key user group.
The solution is technically sophisticated, integrating multiple platforms for a seamless user experience.
A Singular Experience
Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) has been used to facilitate single sign-on across the site as it integrates with multiple data points and platforms.
High Availability. Maximum Redundancy
With 80% of their revenue being earnt in a 1-month period in the lead up to CPD training cut-off, the site employs a highly available, highly redundant hosting structure, using features like Azure’s locally redundant storage.
Maximum Uptime
The solution includes a range of infrastructure and application monitoring, ensuring alerts are issued in the event of any problems with uptime and disaster recovery/triage services are activated within moments of notification.
The site employs a range of key UX / Design focussed elements aimed at aiding search and usability:
Prompting Course Selection
As soon as a user arrives on the College of Law homepage, they are welcomed with a natural language form. This tool enables a user to select which user group they most identify with, and what service they are looking for at the College of Law.
Ideate, design & prototype in a living environment
We streamlined the transition from design to development, creating a 'living' front-end styleguide that enabled consistency in the visual language, keeping the interface logical and strengthening the user experience.
Refining Course Requirements
With thousands of courses on offer at the College of Law, users need to be able to easily filter down their options. Mobile friendly filtering and result optimisation means users are able to drill down to the courses most relevant to them with ease.
Intuitive path to purchase
With a variety of purchasing options available, the solution allows users to purchase on behalf of others, purchase online via a secure paywall, or purchase offline with a requested call back from the College. The ability to select multiple courses, promotional discounting, and a “sticky’ buy now button which follows as user down the page, enables customisation of course enrolments, all with the click of a button.
Data was used extensively to shape the content structure and usability of the site, including such features as:
Audience mapping
Extensive audience mapping has shaped usability, content development and course alignment, making the platform into the ultimate legal career planning and training guide.
Analysis driving usability
Early analysis of site searches showed multiple refinements of search results, and hence highlighted the need for a better filtering system to reduce the number of searches it took to find a suitable result.
Filtering insights by user group
Analytics have been configured to isolate existing students from new users. This filtering allows us to evaluate key differences in user behaviour and tailor the behaviourally targeted components of the site more effectively.
Results Listing
Development has paid for itself in 12 months
The platform has generated online revenues in excess of production costs in less than its first year.
On track to drive 5% improvement year on year
The platform is on track to drive a 5% increase across key metrics in its first year.
Multi-Tenancy driving efficiency
The site has driven multi-tenant efficiencies over 3 installations, with a further 2 planned for this coming year.
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