Customer Success Story - Charles Sturt University

Overview

Established in 1989, Charles Sturt University is #1 for graduate employment and Australia's leading regional university.

With approximately 44,000 students, including more than 25,000 studying online, CSU delivers over 400 courses each year supported by around 2000 full-time equivalent staff. 

Key Takeaways

• Delivering real-time user feedback to the development team has helped embed user feedback as an integral part of the design process removing the friction between UX, Design and Development. 
• The integration with Jira means feedback is automatically routed to the right team member ensuring that action is taken quickly and efficiently. 
• Closing the user feedback loop ensures continued user engagement with the process.

The Challenge

The CSU Web Office is responsible for the design and development of CSU’s numerous web environments spread across a range of user communities including internal faculty, learning environments, student recruitment sites, research portals and staff websites. 

From attracting new students to better engaging with existing students and faculty, user feedback is a vital component of CSU’s web strategy.  

In order to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving digital world, CSU needed to find a better way of collecting user feedback and making it an integral part of the development cycle.

“With so many different websites, supporting the needs of such a vast array of website visitors, finding a time and cost-efficient way of gathering user feedback across all our stakeholder communities was key.” 

Paula Woodhouse User Experience and Design Manager, CSU 

The Solution

CSU implemented Usabilla’s Website Voice of Customer solution which empowered them to put the user at the centre of their digital development process. For example, CSU recently gathered over 150 pieces of user feedback to inform their website redesign and go-live process. 

“User validation is a key component of the CSU web strategy and while this has traditionally been a time consuming, manual process for us, the introduction of Usabilla  means we are now able to gather feedback from each step of the user journey delivering a constant stream of insight back to the development team enabling them to continue to improve that journey in line with user expectations.”

Paula Woodhouse User Experience and Design Manager, CSU 

Usabilla is part of CSU's project management framework, and is routinely enabled (in the form of customer satisfaction and user feedback) at key points as part of all new websites delivered. 

Integrating Usabilla with CSU’s existing Jira implementation has further streamlined the user feedback process enabling the development team to capture insights and seamlessly schedule the required action within a familiar environment.

Usabilla has helped CSU to:

• Better engage with their user communities, bringing them along on the digital journey by not only providing them with a voice but ensuring they know it is being heard. 
• Create a greater awareness and understanding of user insights as a result of receiving feedback directly from the user. 
• Replace costly, time consuming methods of user feedback collection with a simple-to-use real-time solution that delivers immediate access to key insights.
• Put user feedback directly into the hands of the development team. 
• Create user environments that are truly reflective of the users needs.

Usabilla has helped CSU gain greater clarity into what users think, gauging their sites current success and guiding the development process in creating more engaging user experiences. 

Usabilla has been instrumental in opening up a direct channel of communication between CSU’s development team and users, providing the necessary ‘user’ context they needed in order to continue to create the best user experiences. 

To find out more about Usabilla, click here.