Kingston University London
A sleek, effective website to highlight Kingston University's focus on future skills.
Kingston University is a London-based university with specialisms in arts, design, fashion, science, engineering, and business.
The university recognised the need for a new website to support its bold and ambitious ‘Town House Strategy,’ which aims to establish a progressive new model of education focused on the future skills demanded by employers.
Kingston engaged Numiko for a full website rebuild, including extensive discovery research, new designs that draw upon a concurrent rebranding project, and the implementation of the Drupal content management system.
Challenge
Kingston University had a clear vision for what it wished to be known for. The Town House Strategy envisages Kingston University being recognised as a sector leader on future skills, giving graduates the skills that forward-looking businesses will seek out.
The new website needed to reflect this strategic focus, conveying to prospective students that Kingston University stands out for employability and its valuable connections to industry.
Our approach to Kingston University’s new website embraced this point of differentiation and ensured it was woven into every aspect of the design.
Approach
Kingston University’s new website reflects its ambitions to be the UK’s leading university for future skills. The design is extremely clean and clear, cultivating a sense of professional rigour. Design decisions like the minimalist black-and-white colour palette and the use of right angles over soft corners make it feel precise and confident.
Micro-interactions such as the hover states on images and buttons add dynamism to the design and lend it a refined feel. The ‘up and rightward’ arrow symbol is used across several touchpoints, including on the menu, on buttons, or as an image overlay. This arrow subtly evokes progression and development, just as ‘up and to the right’ on graphs denotes a growing metric. This is a nod to Kingston’s focus on developing the in-demand skills that businesses need, making its graduates highly sought-after. In the same vein, the button design on key calls to action uses Kingston’s speech bubble motif, deliberately cultivating a sense of conversation and dialogue.
The information architecture also mirrors the design choices by being simple, understated, and effective. During the discovery phase, we thoroughly tested our proposed information architecture using Treejack testing with over two hundred users. This showed that it was highly effective at structuring the content to enable users to find the content they need.
Taken together, the design is refined and sleek, evoking cutting-edge research and world-leading business partnerships.
Rich course pages
Course pages are an essential touchpoint for conveying the brand and converting prospective students. Analysis of user behaviour shows that prospective students often arrive directly on course pages, bypassing the home page.
This means the course page must perform its crucial role independently of the homepage. Course pages must also be highly flexible, as they are maintained by different teams across the university with different requirements for different courses.
Our modular, component-based design approach allows content teams to create engaging course pages that convey Kingston’s new brand while presenting large quantities of information effectively. Subtle elements like progress bars and ‘chapter titles’ displayed on a persistent header module make the page more navigable and digestible.
"It’s been an absolute joy working with Numiko's super talented, experienced, friendly and professional team. They have a deep understanding of the complexities and challenges HE and non-for-profit sectors are facing, which makes them a great partner for a long-term digital transformation journey."