THE | University Profiles redesign

Overview

At Times Higher Education (THE), I led the redesign of the University Profile pages — the most visited area of the platform, viewed by millions of students and academics worldwide.

Profiles serve a dual purpose: they are a trusted resource for prospective students and a revenue driver through Enhanced Profiles purchased by universities. Before the redesign, they were outdated, inconsistent, and difficult to maintain.

The goal was to create a scalable, modular system that worked across thousands of universities with different types of content, while also making Enhanced Profiles more compelling.

Research

We began with stakeholder workshops across Editorial, Sales, SEO, and Rankings to align on goals and risks.

Key insights came from:

• Hotjar & Analytics → showing high bounce rates and users abandoning pages within seconds.

• Maze surveys with 500+ students and academics, complemented by face-to-face interviews (6 participants per round, across multiple iterations) → revealed confusion around terminology and difficulty comparing universities.

• Competitive analysis → reviewing QS and Studyportals revealed opportunities to surface rankings and fees more clearly.

• Taxonomy review → inconsistent categorisation made profiles hard to scale across different institutions.

From this, we validated a clear content hierarchy: upfront access to fees, location, rankings, and graduate prospects, supported by deeper editorial and research content.

Conceptual designs and Wireframes

The old profiles forced users through long scrolls with buried information. Enhanced Profile features — the main commercial differentiator — were hidden.

I designed modular wireframes in Figma structured around reusable sections: Overview, Rankings, Fees, Student Life, Research, etc. Each profile could adapt based on what content the institution provided, without breaking the layout.

We introduced a left-hand anchor navigation to make long, data-rich pages easy to explore. This was a key solution to the scalability challenge: profiles with more content simply expand the nav, while leaner profiles stay concise..

User Testing

To validate the new Profiles, we ran large-scale Maze testing with over 700 students worldwide, representing a wide range of study interests and geographies.

The goal was simple: could students quickly understand what a profile was for, find the information they cared about most, and feel confident sharing it with peers?

The results told a clear story:

• Students used profiles to decide where to apply. 77% said they would rely on the “For Students” page to compare universities, with rankings and course information close behind. This confirmed we were designing for a decision-making moment, not just casual browsing.

• Navigation improved but needed refinement. Over 80% successfully found the right section, yet misclicks were high, signalling that our anchor navigation and clearer CTAs were critical improvements.

• Content hierarchy mattered. Students consistently wanted fees, rankings, and courses surfaced at the very top. Some feedback was blunt — “too much information to digest” — which drove us to break content into modular, scannable sections.

• Trust was strong. 92% said they would share the profile with a friend — a powerful signal that the redesign had increased clarity and credibility.

The outcome? Testing didn’t just validate our ideas; it sharpened the design into a scalable, student-first framework. We left the process confident that the new Profiles would support both users making high-stakes choices and THE’s commercial model for Enhanced Profiles.