A new Morley College London

In late 2020, we launched a new flagship website for Morley College. Working closely with staff from across the college, we overhauled both the design language and the technical infrastructure.

A growing digital estate

Morley College serves a large and diverse student population across London. Notably it caters to a large cohort of adult learners. In addition, a recent merger with Kensington and Chelsea College had increased the college’s 16-18 provision drastically. The project team needed a deep understanding of user groups and their differing objectives and behaviours in relation to the website.

SMILE conducted a research phase including stakeholder interviews, surveys with internal and external users and competitor research. The culmination of this process was a series of user stories. These supremely powerful sentences helped to drive design direction and provide measures of success for testing design patterns. We consulted throughout on content, design and technical matters.

Turning a vision into reality

Our design process began with wireframes to better understand user journeys and how to tailor design patterns effectively. A suite of UI components were created, enabling pace and consistency. Finally click-hotspots, loading animations, scroll behaviours and state changes were added. The result was a true-to-code clickable prototype which was put through its paces in a series of user tests. The results of these tests helped in validating design choices before any code was written.