The Brief
When COVID hit and international travel ground to a halt, I responded with a unique online, connecting experience
IDP and our network of leading international university partners, rely on international mobility to fuel the recruitment of the best students from across the globe. But with COVID posing ‘once in a lifetime’ challenges, we needed to think of innovative ways to help universities reach students whose plans were on hold, but whose curiosity and ambition weren’t.
Ask IDP was my solution to that problem. An app designed for universities to answer real student questions in bite-sized 30 second clips, and shared with our millions of online users a month.
The Story of Ask IDP
From a comment in a ‘show and share’ session from our Content Team, to producing 5 continuous hours of video footage in the form of hundreds of 30 second video answers. I created a user experience strategy and product that put expert university advice in front of millions of consumers within 2 months, with a 5% click-to-engage and 90% watch-to-the-end adoption rate.
Our Content Team identified that Google in the US had started partnering with universities to produce information snippet videos. It was a great idea, and one IDP thought we could do better. With close partnerships with over 250 of the world’s most recognisable universities, we already had the relationships. With tens of millions of aspirational students attending physical events and visiting our online domains, we knew we had the traffic. In the product backlog, it wasn’t until COVID changed the way we work and travel, that we began a 2 month development cycle.
After exploring the viability of the product, I got to work envisioning how it might work. The benefits were the easy part: students got access to thousands of short pre-answered videos from the university themselves; our university partners had the opportunity to reach out to students through a new medium, and; IDP benefitted from great opportunities to improve SERPs positioning.
The user experience and interface represent a clear, task-oriented design, that allows busy university professionals to contribute content without the fuss or hastle of distraction.
