Designing an online degree marketplace and the CMS that powers it
The State University of New York (SUNY) is the second-largest university system in the US, with 64 colleges and institutions under one parent organization. Their online degree marketplace was getting healthy traffic but wasn’t converting it into applications, and they hired Ranku to figure out why and build the fix. I owned the qualitative and quantitative research and the end-to-end design across both halves of the solution: the student-facing marketplace and the publishing system administrators used to keep it accurate.
My Role
Researcher + UX Designer + QA
The Team
3 Engineers, 1 PM
The Company
Ranku
Research: the site was built for the wrong user
We layered three methods: stakeholder interviews across the system office, marketing, IT, and campuses to understand constraints and what success meant; an analytics review of the full funnel to find where students dropped off; and usability tests and interviews. That last one changed the project. SUNY had built the marketplace for the student they knew best: 18-year-olds choosing a campus. But online programs attract adult learners, so we deliberately recruited working parents, career changers, and degree finishers, and watched them search for programs that fit their real lives.
Students told us plainly: “I don’t care which college I’m technically in. I just need to finish my degree to get a better job.” And: “I’ve got kids, work, and life. If this schedule isn’t flexible, I honestly can’t do it.” The site couldn’t answer either concern. Meanwhile, parallel research with administrators surfaced a second failure: the people closest to the content had the least ability to fix it. Every edit meant emails and IT tickets that disappeared into the system.
Two problems, one system
Problem 1
The marketplace spoke to the wrong user
Healthy traffic, but navigation mirrored institutional hierarchies instead of students’ mental models, and content ignored adult learners’ real questions.
Problem 2
Content updates ran on email and IT tickets
Edits languished, no one could track them, and the administrators responsible for accuracy couldn’t make changes themselves.
The marketplace
Making the real user real for SUNY
I synthesized the research into three archetypal personas: the Career Changer, the Degree Finisher, and the Promotion Seeker. They guided design decisions, but their bigger job was organizational: SUNY knew intellectually that online learners were different, and the personas made that knowledge concrete enough to shape decisions.
Restructuring around degrees, not schools
The old flow forced students to pick a school first, then hunt for degrees inside it. This frequently lead to a dead end if that school didn’t offer what they needed. We inverted it: search by degree or subject, filter by level and format, land on a degree page. The school became a detail on the page, not the path to it.
A homepage and degree pages built for adult learners
The homepage leads with search, backed by a degree-level filter and subject-area entries. Rotating school banners lend accreditation credibility without forcing students down closed hallways, and served as a deliberate olive branch to 64 colleges wary of being downplayed. Degree pages surface key program facts upfront, define higher-ed jargon in plain language where it appears, and answer the questions adult learners actually ask: is this real, can I do it around my job, will my credits transfer.
The publishing system
The wizard failed; modularity won
Unlike the marketplace, this was a zero-to-one build. After whiteboarding and quick clickable prototypes, our first serious direction was a step-by-step wizard, and it tested badly. Administrators don’t work through program data in a fixed order; they jump between sections based on what’s in front of them. We landed on a modular system where any section can be edited independently.
Designing within the bureaucracy, not against it
University hierarchies are real: a professor can edit a course description but not tuition; a college administrator can change tuition but not state restrictions. We built a role structure that mirrors those lines, where each person sees only the fields they’re authorized to edit. The research insight behind it: the frustration was never “I can’t get permissions,” it was “I’m responsible for something I can’t fix.”
A kit of parts for 64 unlike institutions
No two universities structure programs, or even tuition, the same way. Instead of a single template with endless exceptions, I worked with engineering on a small set of well-defined modular components, backed by a full design system: forms, buttons, progressive disclosure, error states.
Outcome
After relaunch, degree inquiries increased by 300% and applications submitted rose by double digits. The nature of inquiries changed too: fewer “how do I find a nursing program” questions, more substantive questions about specific programs. Students weren’t just landing on the site; they were getting far enough to engage seriously.
On the publishing side, the user base was too small for quantitative measurement, so we surveyed administrators with open-ended questions. They reported more frequent updates, fewer email chains, and less frustration overall.