Improved Student Portal structure

ACU’s website for current students, the Student Portal, has been restructured to make it easier for students to find the information and links they need.

This project aimed to use student insights to align content location and navigation much more closely to student expectations. Its focus was to improve the information architecture (IA) of the Portal – an important part of enhancing the student journey, as identified during the Empathy to Experience (UX) project in 2019-20.

According to UX project data and fresh student research conducted last year, students have been struggling to locate information and links to external platforms while using the Portal. Concerns included duplication and repetition of information, broken links and bugs, and content buried in non-obvious locations.

The new IA – which is live on the Portal now for Semester 1 – is expected to yield significant and immediate benefits to students by resolving these issues. It will make content much easier for students to find as well as help them to see all the relevant and useful content that exists on the Portal, so reducing their reliance on services such as AskACU to get answers.

While driven by the Digital Experience team in Marketing and External Relations, this project has involved collaboration with many departments across ACU. Teams within Student Administration, the Office of Student Success, Student Engagement and Services, Campus Ministry, First Peoples, Academic Skills, ACU Engagement and the faculties have been instrumental to implementing and refining the new IA.

You will soon be able to view the new Student Portal sitemap in the website footer. A link to the sitemap will be added to the right of the Privacy Policy.

What’s next

Digital Experience will test the effectiveness of the Student Portal navigation once the new structure has been live for a number of weeks. The location of items will then be tweaked based on student feedback.

A range of other improvements to the Student Portal for staff and students, including search functionality and publishing workflows, are also being scoped at the moment.

If you have any questions about the project or the new IA, please contact the project lead Paul Hudson.