Gresham College
The Challenge
Gresham College wanted to revamp its website so that more people could access their superb selection of content housed in the college’s lecture database.
This connection was something that they had been struggling to do for some time, knowing as they did that there was a large segment of their potential audience who were keen to expand their knowledge but missing out on this vast free library of lectures and information.
Gresham College is an institution that offers so much great free content to the public. The college’s website however wasn’t making it easy for people to discover the full offering from the college.
Amanda Matthews, Project Manager, Un.titled
The Solution
Gresham College engaged Un.titled to help remake their website from the ground up, with certain key goals front and center. One of these goals was to raise Gresham College’s profile in order to enable more people to view the content on offer, which in turn would make it easier for the college to ‘package, present and promote’ what is available.
Another critical goal was to increase audience engagement, looking to convert more people who may watch one video into repeat viewers and channel subscribers. Other objectives included generating more income from donations and sponsorships, and to make the site easier to develop, update and manage for the Gresham team. To achieve these aims, the decision was taken to replatform the Gresham site from WordPress to Drupal 9.
As part of the project, Un.titled’s UX Design team mindfully interpreted and extended the college’s existing brand, supporting Gresham College in reaching wider audiences in a more effective way. Our team also conducted extensive UI and UX work and made significant enhancements to the site’s accessibility.
The new site now has personalised membership accounts, with individual feeds of events and lectures available for each user to enjoy. Account users have the opportunity to build their own playlists, comprised of events they have attended and wish to attend. This offers a unique space where all the content that appeals most to the individual visitor can be curated by hand. Additionally, the site’s event registration functionality now allows users to choose between watching a lecture online or in-person when they sign up, and funnels them through the appropriate channels that can be captured later in their personal playlist.
An additional exciting feature is the new ‘You May Also Like’ feed. Here, content suggestions are updated regularly and provide users with options that are more likely to be of interest and aligned with their tastes. This is preferable to showing the same content over and over while also encouraging a deeper exploration of the wider site.
The new site has a faceted internal search functionality, which allows users to focus their attention on very specific events, speakers or pages. With refined elements and a high level of detail, the Un.titled team carried out custom work to the Drupal search module so that the Gresham team can highlight their most important pages and events. This helps ensure the most accurate and interesting results are displayed for each user, and was an important element to get right for the Gresham team.
To achieve quicker load times, the new Gresham site uses a React app which helps enhance the user experience significantly. Our team brought React into the Drupal platform and created a series of custom endpoints to feed in live data to the front end. The React app is deployed on the What’s On, Watch Now and Speakers pages, and these crucial pages are now faster and offer enhanced filtering options. The new module is flexible enough to showcase speakers, future events or all events depending on a user’s requirements.
Gresham College also uses Vimeo and YouTube to deliver high quality video, and it is also now easier to embed live video on the Gresham website. Once an event is finished, the video is then uploaded to YouTube. This makes watching video content back exceptionally frictionless for end users.
Gresham College also uses Vimeo and YouTube to deliver high quality video, and it is also now easier to embed live video on the Gresham website. Once an event is finished, the video is then uploaded to YouTube. This makes watching video content back exceptionally frictionless for end users.
The Gresham team is able to take advantage of a panel in the backend that enables information to be exported based on events Gresham College has hosted. Having a list of online users who have attended past events and online users who are attending present/future events, for example, gives Gresham an extra level of insight that helps inform promotions and marketing. This information is exported into an XLS document and available to share with the wider team.
Additional elements of the project include the Un.titled team overseeing a complex Mailchimp integration process. This simplifies the management of email services for the Gresham College team.
Overall, this project has been a widely hailed as a major advance for the college and we know that users have responded positively. We look forward together with the college’s digital team to more UX upgrades and fine tuning so that we can bring the optimal online experience for Gresham’s many admirers.
Technologies
Services
We have worked hard to not only revitalise the site from a UX and design perspective, but also provide easier access to lectures that can have a real impact on viewers. We are delighted with the result. Within the first week, people were already finding older content more easily, and the viewer numbers for these pages have risen significantly. I believe we have gone above and beyond the client’s expectations thanks to the heightened discoverability we have brought to the site.
Amanda Matthews, Project Manager, Un.titled
