Designing a student-first vision for university support services
Making it easier for students to access and navigate support at key moments in their university journey.
Impact:
Aligned staff and students around a shared vision for the future of student support services.
Inspired innovation with a series of concepts that brought the future to life through storytelling and digital mockups.
Provided a pathway forward for our client to implement the work.
Timeframe: 8 weeks
Services provided:
Research:
Qualitative ethnographic research
Design:
Service design
Concept creation
Service blueprinting
Prototype testing
Deliverables:
Six actionable insights that reframed how the university approached student support.
A conceptual model of student service interactions, mapping key pain points and opportunities.
A high-level roadmap that outlined tactical quick-wins and longer-term strategic initiatives.
An illustrated model demonstrating how students navigate the support system based on their confidence and trust in the institution.
Context:
Our client, a leading university in Australia, was grappling with how to evolve its student support services in line with the increasingly complex needs of its more than 40,000 students. With students trying to navigate everything from orientation, to enrolment, assessments and accommodation, there was a pressing need to ensure they had access to the right support services at the right time.
Previous research by WAVE had highlighted a number of current difficulties for students— navigating university processes, a lack of confidence in support systems, and fragmented experiences across departments.
WAVE was engaged to help create a forward-thinking, student-first vision for the university’s support services, with a focus on improving the student experience over the next three-to-five years.
Approach:
Our client had already completed a significant amount of work to understand the student journey. We needed to connect the dots between existing initiatives and insights from past research to develop a future vision for services. To reflect work to-date and guide our intent, we collaborated with project stakeholders to establish a set of design principles. Drawing on past insights about student challenges, we integrated existing journey maps and leveraged staff knowledge to ground our approach in real-world experiences.
To find new inspiration, we needed to look outside of the education sector, drawing on other industries and service providers for best practice examples. We explored how government agencies, mental health services, and consumer tech companies were delivering seamless, user-centric services. This research offered fresh perspectives, providing valuable examples that would serve as stimulus for our co-creation efforts with university staff.
To generate novel solutions that would support students across their university journey, we held a series of co-creation workshops with staff, each focussed on a different stage of the student lifecycle. This produced over 100 ideas aimed at improving service delivery. These ideas ranged from automatic enrollment systems to co-locating services and creating digital tools for students to manage their university journey. By engaging staff from faculties, marketing, wellbeing, and frontline services, we ensured our solutions were comprehensive and grounded in practical, first-hand knowledge.
We needed to ensure the concepts we developed met the needs of both students and staff. We conducted validation workshops with students and critique sessions with staff that allowed for continuous refinement of ideas, ensuring buy-in and alignment across the university. To bring concepts to life we defined an overarching narrative that tied them together and developed supporting digital-mockups to visually represent them. By the end of the process, we had established a vision the university could work towards and developed a prioritised set of future-state service concepts ready for further detailed design.
Outcome:
We aligned staff from different faculties and service areas around a shared vision for the future of student support services, developing a clear pathway for the university to follow and an implementation plan to guide ongoing work.
Our work resulted in the creation of eight future-state service concepts designed to support students throughout critical transitions in their university journey, such as course enrollment and connecting with peers.
The project fostered a future-focused mindset among staff, encouraging them to look beyond day-to-day operational issues while demonstrating the need for collaboration across the university at each stage of the student journey. By drawing on analogous service examples outside the tertiary education sector, we were able to shift perspectives and empower staff to think creatively about the future.
