Objective

Create a new SEO-focused site to draw in prospective college students to help them more easily research colleges, majors, and scholarships.

Role

Concepting, High Fidelity Design, Design QA

Goals

• Increase traffic by removing registration requirements

• Increase SEO win rate for majors and scholarship search terms

• Increase conversion by showing value prior to registration

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Every year, Cappex helps 1.5 million high school students find the college that’s right for them, and they’ve been doing so for nearly 15 years. When I joined the company, there were a lot of holes in the product development side of the business. With a new VP of Product there was a big vision for the future of Cappex, however, eliminating 10+ years of tech debt couldn’t be done overnight. So a new initiative was created to build out a pre-registration site to help bring in new users via SEO.

Previous Design

At the time, prospective students were forced to create an account in order to be able to use the Cappex site. This hurt opportunities for new user growth since users weren’t able to see what Cappex had to offer them before being required to give their personal information and register.

If a new user did register, they were met with a slow, dated, inaccessible site. Effort was underway to eliminate tech debt, but the business couldn’t afford to wait for that effort to be completed.

Ideation

Cappex did not have the Product or Design resources to commit to such a big effort, so they hired an outside design firm for help setting a new tone and style for the new site. I worked with the firm weekly to provide design feedback and direction from Cappex leadership. The relationship was short-lived though, as budget did not allow Cappex to continue working with the firm for long. In the end, Cappex received standards for fonts, colors, and one final screen design (the college profile).

Design + Impact

After the relationship with the outside firm ended, I picked up what had been handed off and used it as a launch point to design the rest of the site. The building blocks were there, but several brand new pages still needed to be created. Since the goal of this site was SEO friendliness, I worked with an outside SEO firm to understand and implement designs for SEO pages design to bring in search traffic.

Exact performance results aren’t known as I left Cappex shortly after the site launched. However, the effort did contribute to Cappex becoming acquired by education firm EAB just over a year later.