Lane Community College
Reversing Enrollment Decline With Seamless UX
CMS
Drupal
Services
Discovery, IA/UX, Content, Design
LaunchED
2022
THE CHALLENGE
Process Friction Reducing Online Applications
Lane Community College is a well-known and well-loved college in Oregon, with 15,000 students across 5 campuses. The College had been struggling with declining enrollment over the last decade, without a clear understanding of why. Our discovery process revealed that the decline in enrollment was not from a lack of interest, but rather a drop-off during the application process.
The problem was clear – the UX on their college website created friction and confusion around processes and next steps. We needed to make the experience seamless to improve conversion rates.
Outcomes
in enrollment after a decade of decline
in returning students
in continuing students
OUR APPROACH
Enhanced UX for a College Website
Our UX, Design, and Content teams collaborated to create a clear, straightforward mobile-first website solution that allows prospective students to self-identify and choose their journey. This is supported by a simple, hierarchical design system and seamless UX that guides users through the process and ensures a consistent experience when navigating the network of information.
As a cornerstone of our process, we structured usability testing sessions with prospective students to ensure that the solution was thoroughly challenged and refined prior to launch.
Building a Higher Education Website That Supports Enrollment
For Lane Community College, the website redesign was not simply a visual update. It was an opportunity to rethink how prospective students moved from initial interest to application. By combining higher education UX strategy, content strategy, information architecture, and Drupal development, iFactory created a more intuitive digital experience designed around the needs of future students.
The new college website makes key enrollment information easier to find, reduces unnecessary steps, and provides clearer pathways for users with different goals and levels of familiarity with Lane. A mobile-first approach was especially important, ensuring prospective students could research programs, understand next steps, and begin the enrollment process from any device.
This project also demonstrates the value of usability testing in higher education website design. Testing with prospective students helped identify points of confusion before launch and gave the team evidence to refine navigation, page structure, and calls to action.
The result was a website that better connected Lane Community College’s digital experience with its enrollment goals. Following launch, the College reported a 26% increase in enrollment after a decade of decline, along with growth among both returning and continuing students. The project shows how thoughtful higher education website strategy can improve usability while supporting measurable institutional outcomes.
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