Simplifying the Digital Experience Across a Multi-College Group
Client: Salford City College Group
The Challenge
Salford City College Group supports thousands of prospective students, parents, employers, adult learners and existing students across multiple colleges, each with different goals and information needs.
Over time, the website had grown into a large and complex digital estate. Navigation had become difficult to maintain, content had become fragmented and there was little consistency between colleges, making it harder for users to find information and for internal teams to manage the platform.
The challenge was to rethink the digital experience from the ground up—creating a scalable structure that would improve usability while providing a foundation for future growth across the entire college group.
The Approach
Rather than starting with page designs, the project began by understanding the people using the website and the tasks they were trying to complete.
The work included:
- Facilitating stakeholder workshops to understand organisational objectives.
- Creating detailed personas representing key audience groups including school leavers, parents, employers, adult learners and existing students.
- Mapping user journeys to identify pain points and opportunities.
- Conducting a comprehensive audit of the existing website and information architecture.
- Reorganising the navigation around user needs rather than organisational structure.
- Classifying every page into a small number of reusable templates to simplify both design and development.
- Creating a scalable design system and component library to ensure consistency across the group.
Rather than designing hundreds of individual pages, the focus shifted to creating a flexible digital framework that could support multiple colleges while remaining easy to maintain and extend.
The Outcome
The project has established a clear strategic foundation for the next generation of the Salford City College Group website.
The work has delivered:
- A user-centred information architecture based on genuine audience needs.
- A simplified navigation structure that supports multiple audience types.
- A reusable template strategy that significantly reduces design and development complexity.
- A scalable design system that provides consistency across colleges while supporting future growth.
- A structured implementation roadmap that enables developers to build and migrate content with confidence.
The project is now progressing into the visual design and implementation phase, with the strategic groundwork providing a clear framework for delivery.
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