DATE: 2014

LINCOLN UNIVERSITY

ROLE: Discovery, IA, Design

A desire to feed the world

Lincoln University is New Zealand’s specialist land-based university. For more than 135 years, Lincoln has focused on improving New Zealand’s land-based knowledge, wealth and productivity. However, by 2014 their existing website had become outdated and in need of replacement. Lincoln’s primary objective for their new site was to attract new students, and to get them to apply online. To help them reach this goal, we knew that their site would have to be attractive to a university age audience, cater to all device sizes, and provide the University with more opportunities to present and refresh their promotional content.

We interviewed students, teachers, staff and parents and listened to where their pain-points were and what we could do that would really make things better for them. The new site simplified the pathways, flattened levels of content and made better use of the great visuals owned by the university.

Built to inspire students both old and new.

Along with making the site current and easy to use, we also wanted to give it the opportunity to inspire both incoming and current students by telling the stories of some of the alumni. These stories told about the exciting things they are doing now, and what course program they followed while at Lincoln University.

Particular attention was paid to the design of the degree detail pages. Each degree type had many courses and documents associated with it, and it’s quite important for the student to know the necessary requirements so that they can plan accurately.

Built to inspire

The redesign of the site focused on telling the stories of alumni and how they are applying what they’ve learned to inspire others in their courses of study.

Strong Visual Style

Lincoln is a very hands on university. The students learn by getting out and doing the things that they are studying. It was important to show this visually on the site.

Clear Pathways

The students had found the previous site to be too text heavy and deep. They would quite often fall down rabbit holes while researching. We flattened out these paths where possible and gave clear visual cues to direct them where they needed to be.

Student-centric programme pages

Restructured the programme templates to guide the students through all the items needed for each area of study so that they wouldn’t have to worry about missing important pieces of the puzzle.

Providing tools and knowledge for New Zealand farmers
Films for cat lovers