Case Study / Education Technology
Designing for Impact:
How GA's Overhaul Boosted Engagement & Growth
GA engaged Wunderman Thompson to solve a complex strategic problem: how to reposition a decade-old market leader's digital experience to serve two fundamentally different audiences — without diluting either. I owned UX strategy end-to-end, from structuring the research program to aligning C-suite stakeholders on a direction that simultaneously drove B2C conversion and enterprise revenue growth.
unified under one strategy
through stakeholder workshops
anchoring the redesign
Strategic Challenge
GA came to us at a business inflection point. A decade of market leadership was being eroded by a wave of lower-cost competitors, and their existing digital experience — built for a simpler time — couldn't carry the weight of a dual-market strategy. My mandate was to define what a redesigned GA.com needed to accomplish for both individual learners and enterprise clients, and to build the strategic and research foundation that would make the right design decisions inevitable.
Research Strategy
With no direct customer access, I designed a multi-method research program to generate the insight fidelity we needed. I structured stakeholder engagement across six internal divisions — not just to gather data, but to build organizational alignment from the outset. That cross-functional buy-in became as valuable as the research itself.
Method 01
Stakeholder Alignment
Facilitated workshops across Sales, Marketing, Admissions, Client Services, and Digital leadership. The goal wasn't just insight extraction — it was establishing shared understanding of audience priorities across divisions that rarely spoke to each other.
Method 02
Quantitative Research
Designed and deployed attitudinal surveys via OptimalWorkshop to validate GA's proto-personas against real behavioral signal. Findings directly challenged several internal assumptions about who the B2C audience actually was.
Method 03
Analytics Audit
Led a deep-dive with GA's analytics team using Google Analytics and Crazy Egg heatmaps to diagnose where the existing site was losing users — translating behavioral data into strategic content and hierarchy decisions.
Method 04
Competitive Intelligence
Directed a systematic audit of competitor digital experiences, content strategies, and positioning. Identified a significant gap in thought leadership and outcomes transparency that GA was uniquely positioned to own.
Audience Definition
I reframed GA's existing proto-personas into a strategic audience architecture — moving from demographic sketches to decision-making models. Each persona was built to answer a specific design question: what does this user need to believe before they act? That framing kept every subsequent design decision anchored to human motivation, not organizational assumptions.
B2C · Striver Type 1
Tech-Curious Striver
Making a high-stakes career pivot from a non-tech background. The core design challenge: reducing fear-of-failure before any conversion can happen. This user needs GA to function as a trusted advisor, not a sales funnel.
- Outcome data and alumni proof points at decision moments
- Industry forecasts that validate the career shift
- Emotional reassurance woven into the content hierarchy
- Diversity representation in success stories
B2C · Striver Type 2
Tech-Specific Striver
Already committed to a career direction; evaluating GA on competitive grounds. The design challenge shifts from emotional persuasion to substantive differentiation — this user is doing real due diligence.
- Role-specific curriculum depth and instructor credibility
- Market demand data and salary benchmarks
- Thought leadership that signals GA's authority
- Clear comparison against alternative pathways
B2C Secondary
GA Alumni
A high-lifetime-value segment GA was significantly under-serving. I identified this as a strategic retention and advocacy opportunity — graduates who feel supported become GA's most credible marketing asset.
- Dedicated alumni pathways in global navigation
- Structured peer mentorship and networking access
- Ongoing career resources beyond graduation
- Mechanisms to surface and amplify their stories
B2B · Enterprise
Talent Acquisition Partner
Enterprise clients with a dual need: sourcing entry-level technical talent and upskilling existing teams. Their decision criteria are fundamentally different from B2C — ROI, retention rates, and candidate quality override emotional storytelling entirely.
- Retention and placement metrics that justify the investment
- GA positioned as a workforce development thought leader, not just a vendor
- Diversity pipeline data addressing enterprise hiring mandates
- Clearly separated B2B pathways — enterprise users were getting lost in B2C content
Strategic Opportunities
Synthesizing research across personas, analytics, and competitive intelligence, I defined six strategic opportunities that would shape the redesign. The critical insight: the most impactful gaps were content and positioning failures, not UX failures. That reframe shifted executive expectations — and the entire project scope.
Reframe the Value Proposition
GA was competing on price in a race it couldn't win. I repositioned the digital experience around outcomes, instructor credibility, and curriculum depth — shifting the competitive frame from cost to return on investment.
Lead with Industry Foresight
Career-changers aren't just buying a course — they're betting on a future. I directed a content strategy that surfaced tech sector demand data at key decision moments, turning abstract career anxiety into concrete, evidence-backed confidence.
Systematize Social Proof
Alumni success stories were GA's most persuasive asset and their most underutilized one. I designed a framework for surfacing outcome data, diverse testimonials, and graduate statistics at the moments of highest user doubt.
Activate the Alumni Base
GA had tens of thousands of graduates with no structured re-engagement path. I made the case to leadership that this was a retention and advocacy failure with a direct revenue impact — and defined the experience architecture to address it.
Build an Enterprise-Grade B2B Experience
Enterprise clients were navigating a site built for individuals. I defined a distinct B2B content and navigation system — positioning GA as a strategic workforce partner, not just a training vendor — backed by retention data and upskilling ROI.
Restructure Content Hierarchy
Analytics showed users were disengaging because of content sequence failures, not navigation problems. I used heatmap and scroll data to reorder the information architecture — ensuring the right story reached users at the right moment in their decision journey.
Journey Architecture
I led the development of end-to-end journey maps for all three audience segments — B2C, B2B, and Alumni — mapping every touchpoint where GA had an opportunity to build trust, remove friction, or accelerate a decision. These maps became the primary alignment tool with GA's executive team.
"The most significant finding wasn't a UX problem — it was a strategic one. GA was asking users to make a life-changing decision without giving them the evidence they needed to feel safe doing it."
The journey maps made something important visible to GA's leadership: the experience wasn't failing at navigation or interaction design. It was failing at persuasion. Users — particularly career-changers — were arriving with genuine intent and leaving without converting because the content sequence wasn't meeting them where they were emotionally. I used this framing to reorient the entire redesign around decision confidence: identifying the specific moments of doubt in each journey, and designing content interventions that addressed those moments directly. This strategic reframe also gave us license to prioritize content redesign over UI redesign — a shift that significantly improved the project's ROI and executive buy-in.
Outcomes & Impact
The strategy and research phase delivered four durable assets that became the foundation for GA's ongoing digital transformation — and established a clear organizational model for how design decisions would be made going forward.
Audience Architecture
A validated four-persona framework — built from research, tested with stakeholders, and adopted by GA's Marketing, Sales, and Product teams — replacing ad hoc audience assumptions with a shared, evidence-based model.
Dual-Market Digital Strategy
A unified content and experience strategy that serves two radically different audiences from a single platform — without forcing users to self-identify or navigate through irrelevant content to reach their goals.
Executive Alignment
Journey maps and opportunity frameworks that earned sign-off from GA's senior leadership team — creating organizational consensus around a design direction that had previously been fragmented across competing internal priorities.
Redesign Roadmap
A prioritized redesign roadmap — sequenced by user impact and business value — that gave GA's internal teams a clear path forward and a decision-making framework they could own beyond the agency engagement.