A research-led redesign of 200+ K-12 private school websites. I built the evidence base, set the UX strategy, and led design through launch, lifting visit-to-inquiry conversion for prospective families.
Spring Education Group operates over 200 private school websites, the primary way prospective families find and inquire about enrollment. I led both the research and the redesign: defining the questions, gathering the evidence, and turning it into a strategy for improving Visit-to-Inquiry (V2I) conversion across desktop and mobile.
Every design decision on this project traces back to evidence: GA4 analytics, heuristic evaluation, competitive analysis, parent interviews, surveys, and usability sessions. Research wasn't a phase here. It ran the whole project.
Spring Education Group operates private schools across the United States, serving families from early childhood through high school. Each school has its own grade levels, geographic market, and brand, but they all share the same core need: a website that converts prospective parents into inquiries.
These websites had to do three things well:
Before touching anything, I pulled GA4 data to understand what was actually happening year over year. The homepage was picking up more traffic, but overall site sessions were down. Engagement time was up, which told me people were interested once they landed. They just weren't finding what they needed fast enough to convert. That diagnosis became the brief.
| Period | Sessions | Active Users | New Users | Avg. Engagement | Key Events |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Traffic | |||||
| May-Dec 2024 | 331,347 | 270,850 | 247,451 | 1m 06s | 13,051 |
| May-Dec 2023 | 411,715 | 299,441 | 290,032 | 39s | 14,076 |
| Change YoY | -19.52% | -9.55% | -14.68% | +69.37% | -7.28% |
| Homepage Only | |||||
| May-Dec 2024 | 77,541 | 69,323 | 64,807 | 43s | 1,143 |
| May-Dec 2023 | 56,678 | 48,119 | 43,647 | 46s | 1,009 |
| Change YoY | +36.81% | +44.07% | +48.48% | -6.52% | +13.28% |
I designed a mixed-methods study: surveys, interviews, and moderated usability sessions with prospective parents. The goal was to learn what parents were actually looking for, what drove their decisions, and what was getting in their way, then triangulate the qualitative findings against the GA4 data so we weren't designing from anecdotes.
Parents were asked "What is most important to you in a school for your child?"
"I wish I knew more about the curriculum and what makes it different from the other schools in my area."
Parent, usability session"I'd love to see images of children actively learning in the classroom and to know what kinds of activities fall within the components of Links to Learning."
Parent, usability session"Safety is my biggest concern with my child these days. I want to know how the schools are going to keep my child safe."
Parent, usability sessionI reviewed competitor school websites to see what they were doing well and where SEG had room to stand out. The patterns were consistent across every strong performer:
The wireframes came straight out of the findings: value messaging front and center, an inquiry path you can't miss, and faster routes to the content parents told us mattered most, like curriculum and safety. I also built distinct color systems tied to each school's brand identity while keeping accessibility in check.
We iterated in rounds, bringing designs back to stakeholders regularly. When some pushed for a uniform look across all schools, I made the case with research, not opinion: stronger differentiation helped parents connect with the right school faster. The data won the room.
Building within WordPress meant technical constraints were real. I brought the dev team in from day one, kept everything annotated in Figma Dev Mode, and ran weekly syncs with engineering to catch issues before they turned into redesign requests.
Final deliverables included a responsive components library, annotated Figma specs, and interaction documentation. I used Figma Dev Mode throughout to make sure developers had everything they needed without having to track me down.
A snippet of how I communicate with developers - detailed, clear, no room for guessing.
Each school had different branding, inconsistent layouts, no unified CTA, and a broken mobile experience. There was no design system holding it together.
Measurement was scoped into this project from day one, not bolted on after. We tracked May through December 2025 against the same period in 2024: sessions, active users, and new users all grew by 20% or more site-wide, and the homepage improved on every metric we measured.
| Period | Sessions | Active Users | New Users | Avg. Engagement | Key Events |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Traffic | |||||
| May-Dec 2025 | 404,370 | 345,164 | 311,761 | 1m 00s | 12,327 |
| May-Dec 2024 | 331,347 | 270,850 | 247,451 | 1m 06s | 13,051 |
| Change YoY | +22.04% | +27.44% | +25.99% | -8.6% | -5.55% |
| Homepage Only | |||||
| May-Dec 2025 | 93,842 | 83,000 | 77,947 | 52s | 1,162 |
| May-Dec 2024 | 77,541 | 69,323 | 64,807 | 43s | 1,143 |
| Change YoY | +21.02% | +19.73% | +20.28% | +19.28% | +1.66% |
Two site-wide numbers moved the other way: average engagement and key events. With new users up 26%, that pattern is consistent with a larger share of first-time, top-of-funnel visitors, who spend less time per session than returning families deep in their search. The homepage, the main entry point for prospective parents, told the cleaner story: every metric improved, including engagement time (+19%) and key events.
This project was a turning point. Midway through it, I was promoted to Senior UX Designer: recognition for leading the research, the strategy, and the cross-functional team that delivered the results.
More than anything else I had worked on, this pushed me to think and operate at a strategic level: grounding decisions in data, working through competing priorities with stakeholders, and owning the work from early discovery all the way through post-launch measurement.
Designing across 200+ school brands while keeping everything feeling cohesive was a real balancing act. WordPress shaped design decisions more than I would have liked. Certain patterns just weren't feasible in the CMS, which meant finding workarounds and having honest conversations about what would make it into v1.