Redesigning the Economist’s prestigious MBA rankings

Business challenge

We worked with the Economist to re-design it’s prestigious 'Which MBA?' website to improve the user experience and to facilitate a set of digital marketing goals. 

Which MBA? is a high traffic section of the Economist website that had yet to be brought in line with the latest economist re-brand. We were tasked with re-designing the website to provide a beautiful and intuitive browsing experience and to integrate advertising in a thoughtful and subtle way to increase conversion rates.

Understanding the world of MBA rankings 

We got started by immersing ourselves in the different MBA rankings and learning as much as we could about existing insight and analytics around the usage of the website. We also spent time clarifying the key marketing goals so we could be aware of how best to facilitate conversions while keeping user experience in mind. 

We also reviewed the Economist's digital pattern library so we could determining determine what existing front-end components we could make use of and document any new components that we may need to create as part of this re-design.

Creating an intuitive browsing experience

Once we had enough insight and understanding of user needs and marketing goals we were able to start wireframing and prototyping user flows and page designs to share with Economist product owners to get feedback on the direction we were taking.

We simplified the navigation and made it easy for users to search and compare schools/programmes across all three of the Economist rankings, over time, by sub-indicators and by geography. We took a mobile first approach to the design but made sure the experience was optimised for all screen sizes.

Results

In a short space of time we were able to provide the Economist with a set of responsive designs and documentation that could be taken forward into development by their internal product teams.

We continue to work with the Economist on digital projects for their career services and adaptive learning suite of digital products.

 Services provided

• Discovery 
• Wireframing & prototyping
• Design direction
• Interaction design