Survey Analysis: Student-User Attitudes on and Engagement with MyWorldAbroad Website (3-minute read)

January 2019 - May2019 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA | Team: Four UX Researchers

Brief: The global, career resource website, MyWorldAbroad sought to learn more about its B2C customers more in depth, who encompassed mainly North American university students pursuing international careers and study. MyWorldAbroad had been experiencing significant challenges to its business including a decrease in page visits by students, decrease in paid-subscriptions from university customers, and aspects of its design, content, and interaction flow that the company believed hindered user exploration of the site.

Approach

In collaboration with my team, we executed a user survey study (first a pilot and later a final survey) to collect data on the backgrounds of the end users (e.g., university students) and get a feel for their experience using MyWorldAbroad as a desktop website, including their sentiments, behaviors, and challenges when interacting with the website.

To determine the website's value to users, we divided them into two groups based on frequency of use. The top 500 users were frequent users, with at least four sessions in the past six months. The 300 most recent users who only used the website once were considered infrequent. We sent similar questionnaires to both groups via Qualtrics and offered a small gift card as compensation for their time.

Process

  1. Held stakeholder interviews to identify the metrics of success that MyWorldAbroad was not performing well in and for recruiting survey respondents.

  2. Led team meetings to draft research questions for each category of user characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors, and later produced survey questions based on our research questions. As a team we analyzed the data together, but we each drafted different sections of the report. I served as the project manager for this study entailing that I handled client communication, led the ResearchOps, approved all survey questions, and edited final deliverables.

  3. Shared analysis and survey data with client to socialize findings & recommendations and triangulate this study with previous research studies.

Results & Outcome

After sharing the survey with client stakeholders for two segments over five days, we received from (n=86) respondents. From the survey we learned that there was a significant interest among users in going abroad to experience new cultures while working or studying. Furthermore, the most popular user flows on the MyWorldAbroad website were Job Boards and Internship Resources but most users were dissatisfied with these flows, which potentially, could have led to high user abandonment rates. Lastly, the academic level of respondents influenced their usage of MyWorldAbroad, indicating a possible need for more tailored content by academic level.