From Text-Heavy to Trustworthy: A Study Choice Transformation
Studyportals is a global platform that helps students find and compare higher education programs worldwide. Visited by 50M+ users yearly, it lists 200K+ courses and collaborates with 3.5K+ institutions over 110 countries. I helped the product portfolio transition to a new visual design direction that aligns with company’s branding while improving the usability.
Company
Studyportals
Duration
1 year
Kickoff
2019
Role
Lead UX Designer
Services
Visual design, brand alignment, digital product design
Expert reviews and user feedback from NPS surveys and interviews revealed the core problems: the design was overloaded with text, lacked inspiration, and felt disconnected.
To establish Studyportals as a brand that feels both trustworthy and inspiring, we focused on storytelling, branding, and motion. We experimented with style tiles, refined them through critique sessions, and developed a unified style tile as the foundation for our new design.
Using first impression tests, preference tests, usability tests, and VisAWI, we measured how well users perceived and navigated the new design versus the old one. The new design outperformed the old one across all metrics.
“Relentless drive to improve the product, processes and own skills comes to mind when I think about Berkay. I had the pleasure of working with Berkay for 5.5 years at Studyportals. During this time, Berkay made things happen in the design system, website redesign, product strategy workflow improvements and many more projects. He also helped other designers and product owners to grow by sharing his learnings and providing encouragement. I am looking forward to the next time we can collaborate again!”
- Den Tserkovnyi, UX Team Lead @ Studyportals
We redesigned the pages to tell a cohesive story by mapping and categorizing existing content through a content inventory and a card sorting study. We integrated updated branding elements to align the design with Studyportals’ corporate identity and enhance brand visibility. To make the design more approachable, we incorporated motion, creating delightful user interactions.
After securing stakeholder approvals, we incorporated the UI kit changes into our new design system, enabling different product teams to use the updated components.
The new course page design received more positive feedback on NPS and led to a 12% increase in registration on desktop and a 56% increase on mobile for engaged users. It’s still in use and has been implemented across several pages on Bachelorsportal, Mastersportal, and PhDportal.