A great university website is a recruitment tool, a retention tool and a first impression all at once. It’s the result of deliberate decisions about how people experience it, from the moment they land on the homepage to the moment they find what they need.
A solid user experience (UX) can help universities maximize enrollment success and weather future challenges. We’ve assembled a list of the top UX practices that higher education institutions can implement now in order to provide the best digital experience for their students, faculty and enrollment prospects.
1. Consistent branding
This seems obvious, but it can be hard to pull off in large institutions with numerous divisions and departments. A brand is an identity built from ideas, values and emotions. For universities, that identity is what attracts and retains students. Applying the brand consistently across the entire digital product is integral for an institution’s user experience:
- A consistent brand helps express your institution’s core values across the experience, no matter what page or section the user is on
- A consistent experience can help garner trust from users by giving them an idea on what to expect across each page
- It helps unify all of the departments under a single unified message and feel and provides a consistent experience no matter what page a student, faculty or enrollee lands on.
- It reduces cognitive load by setting clear expectations as users move through a site. That predictability also eases anxiety for users who struggle with constant change, including those with autism or short term memory impairments.
- Naturally, online branding should complement the offline brand across all physical materials.
2. Navigation
University websites serve a wider range of audiences than almost any other kind of site. Poor navigation doesn’t just frustrate them. It costs you enrollment prospects who couldn’t find what they needed and gave up.
Here’s what good navigation looks like in practice:
Clear pathways: A pathway is a direct, labeled route that takes a specific audience exactly where they need to go. Higher ed sites often try to serve everyone from the homepage at once, which ends up serving no one well. Identifying your primary audiences and their core goals is the first step toward giving each group an obvious starting point.
Link to important content: Surface the pages your users need most. These include campus life, courses and department pages. Calls to action should be specific and action-oriented, so users know exactly what happens when they click.
Consistency: Branding and structure should stay predictable across every section of the site. When navigation shifts from one department to the next, users lose their bearings. Keeping it consistent reduces cognitive load and builds trust.
3. Accessibility
Roughly 15% of the world’s population lives with some kind of disability. In the United States, that number climbs to nearly 26% of adults. That’s a significant portion of the students, faculty and prospective enrollees your site needs to serve.
It’s also required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, as Title II specifically targets higher education.
Accessible websites offer another bonus: they tend to rank better in search engines. Many of the same practices that make a site easier for people with disabilities also make it easier for search engines to read and index.
Here are the most important areas to address:
Color contrast: Sufficient contrast between text and background ensures people with visual impairments can actually read your content.
Links: Links should look distinct from regular text so users know they can click them.
Text and headings: Readable font sizes, logical heading structure and avoiding all-caps text makes content easier to parse for everyone, especially users with dyslexia or cognitive disabilities.
Keyboard and assistive technology: Users who can’t operate a mouse rely on keyboards and screen readers to get around.
Images and video: Alt text, captions and transcripts make visual and audio content available to users who can’t see or hear it.
Forms: Clear labels and helpful error messages ensure users can complete forms without getting stuck.
Animations: Subtle, non-flashing animations protect users with epilepsy and reduce distraction for everyone else.
4. Mobile-first and responsive
As of 2024, 64% of global internet traffic comes from mobile devices and 90% of US adults own one. For universities, this means a significant portion of prospective students are using mobile to find and navigate your site.
The two approaches that define modern mobile design are mobile-first and responsive design. Mobile-first means designing for smaller screens before scaling up to desktop, prioritizing essential content and stripping away anything that hurts usability or performance. Responsive design uses fluid grids, flexible images and media queries to adapt a site to any screen size.
They differ in philosophy but work best together: mobile-first defines what matters most, and responsive design scales that experience up without starting from scratch.
How to design a responsive user experience
A responsive website is the starting point for any mobile-first approach. If your site can’t adapt to a mobile screen, it isn’t truly mobile-first.
- Use fluid grids and images, flexible layouts and scalable typography
- Use media queries to adapt designs to different device sizes
How to design a mobile-first user experience
Keep the layout simple
- Reduce clutter by removing unnecessary visual elements
Content first
- Use hierarchy, whitespace and text styles to show the user what the essential content is.
- Provide clear calls-to-action to relevant content
- Use progressive disclosure to focus on the most relevant content first and then reveal more if needed
Be selective with your images
- Consider removing less important imagery to maximize space and prioritize important content
Clear, simple navigation
- Bigger calls-to-action/click targets for larger fingers (48px minimum)
- Simplified menu (drawer menu with the essential pathways)
5. Performance
Page load speed can make or break your digital experience. Today’s users expect pages to load fast, and Gen Z especially won’t wait:
- Generation Z’s attention span is only 8 seconds
- 53% of Gen Zers will abandon a page that takes over three seconds to load
- 40% of users will abandon a page if it takes longer than four seconds to load
If higher education institutions want to attract and retain new students, performance should be a key aspect of their user experience.
Basic ways to improve site performance
- Use minimal scripts/plugins
- Use smaller image sizes
- Use animations and videos sparingly; using too many can slow performance
- Use smaller length videos
- Limit the number of font styles and use web-safe fonts
- Incorporate a more minimal design style that’s less graphics-heavy
- Use image compression to ensure images sizes are as small as possible
- Enable caching
- Limit the number of http requests; under 50 is the general guideline, while under 20 is ideal for fast-loading pages
- Limit redirect usage and external scripts
- Optimize CSS and JavaScript
- Optimize backend databases
6. Ongoing support is critical
While some of these tips may seem basic or even obvious, they can fall by the wayside quickly if your site isn’t receiving ongoing support.
That’s why it’s critical to keep on top of these so your site stays healthy and performant, particularly in an environment where online learning is increasingly more common.
Ready to take these practices further?
A great UX is integral for a university to be successful in appealing to and reaching a wider audience. Following these key UX practices can not only enhance a university’s experience but maximize the potential of retaining and attracting students, faculty and staff and alumni alike.
If you’re looking for more information on improving higher education digital experiences, check out these additional resources:
