The moment we realized our website needed to change came from a simple piece of feedback we heard so often from students: They couldn’t figure out where to start applying—on a website designed entirely for applications.

When the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre (OUAC) began planning the redesign of our website in 2023, we made a deliberate decision not to start with design assumptions or internal opinions. Instead, we started by listening.

Through UX research and surveys with three key audiences—high school students and current applicants, guidance counsellors and OUAC staff—we gathered insights about how people were experiencing the site. The signals were clear: Users struggled with navigation, had difficulty finding key information and often encountered processes that made sense internally but not externally.

These signals became the foundation for our redesign strategy.

Join Andrea Patterson, Communications Specialist: Web and Design at the OUAC, in this session where she will walk you through how UX research shaped the strategy behind the new OUAC website. You will see examples of the site before and after the redesign and learn how user feedback was translated into clear strategic goals and practical design decisions.

Andrea will also provide a short interactive exercise where you will review sample user feedback and work together with your colleagues to identify the signals behind it. Then you’ll translate those insights into potential website improvements—mirroring the process used during the OUAC redesign.

This session aims to demonstrate how listening carefully to your users can move UX research from a “nice to have” activity to a strategic driver of digital change.