Project Overview

There's a lot of information that students need to be across, aside from the content of their tertiary studies—course and subject details, class timetables, events, forms, campus information, and more. Not only does this information vary from student to student, but it can change over time as details are updated or amended.

Students at CQUniversity Australia had no source of truth for all this critical information and were often uncertain of where to go to complete actions. This was echoed by support services, who were constantly receiving calls from students who were confused about next steps they should take.

CQUniversity identified that a fractured digital ecosystem was making it difficult for students to make sense of all the things they needed to be prepared and stay organised, undermining their ability to engage with their studies.

This collaboration between CQUniversity and Liquid Interactive transformed the digital experience for students by providing a central point to access everything they need. By putting personalisation at the heart of MyCQU, the website guides and supports students, from enrolment through to graduation, allowing them to focus on their studies.

Project Commissioner

CQUniversity Australia

Project Creator

Liquid Interactive

Project Brief

It’s understandable how a university can accumulate dozens of technology systems or solutions over time. As students’ needs are uncovered or evolve, new technology is added to service those needs. But often, the side effect is an increasingly fragmented experience, which leads to confusion and a disjointed user experience.

The brief was to co-design a digital experience that was seamless for the user but had the interoperability to work with legacy systems, including single sign-on (SSO), so students and staff of CQUniversity could continue to use their existing logins.

Improving the overall student experience would require a much more guided journey across the digital landscape, assisted by centralising student information, content and handoffs to other systems.

The solution had to:

- help guide a diverse student population, yet still feel like a personalised, tailored experience to the individual using it;

- grow in a data-driven fashion, with analytics informing evaluations, decisions, and optimisations;

- be future-proof, with the flexibility and adaptability to respond to, or even pre-empt, the dynamic environment of the higher education sector; and

- allow for content to be added and easily maintained by CQUniversity content editors.

Project Innovation/Need

MyCQU’s most successful feature is the “Checklist”: a tailored list of tasks, guiding students through what they need to get started at CQU. It is specific to each student and gets status updates from other systems so students can track their progress through the crucial onboarding stage. It embodies what MyCQU needs to be: the heart of the student experience, the assistant guiding students along their journeys—the glue holding all the pieces together.

The Checklist is possible due to a customised, hybrid technology solution that seamlessly integrates multiple systems and software. CQUniversity had set up an integration platform to hook into each of those systems; what Liquid helped to do was add APIs to the mix to start requesting and pushing data between MyCQU and other sources.

The result meant students and staff could log in to MyCQU using their standard university credentials, keeping the website consistent and removing a barrier to uptake of MyCQU. It was a huge win for the project team, and something that our technology partner, Sitecore, themselves acknowledged hadn’t been done before with the current tech stack.

This infrastructure solution also ensured that personalisation could be baked in from the start for any component or feature in MyCQU.

Design Challenge

When designing a personalised user experience, the first step is, unsurprisingly, getting to know the humans at the centre. With CQUniversity’s students, we knew this would be a challenge.

The tertiary institution delivers more than 300 education and training offerings, from TAFE qualifications through to undergraduate, postgraduate and Research Higher Degrees (RETs). These opportunities span five states, with 14 campuses and several study hubs. CQUniversity is also a leader in distance education, delivering to students based in rural and remote areas. Every program represents a different set of needs, priorities, and resources—and then there’s the differences between students themselves.

For MyCQU to be a seamless and personalised digital experience, we needed to understand the requirements and expectations of a large cross-section of the student body, building a rich portrait as efficiently as possible. We needed to work with business analysts to figure out all the steps students needed to complete to be ready for their first day of study, and how those steps varied between populations and situations: TAFE students, grad students, different programs, different campuses, online, on-site, and so on.

Since launching, the challenge has continued as new students use the platform. The latest cohort is helping to tease out MyCQU’s merits and opportunities for improvement that aren’t anchored in experiences of the old platform.

User Experience

MyCQU is a dynamic guide for students to help them get started or continue studying at CQUniversity, fed by data from multiple systems. Personalisation means students only see the steps they need to take in their Checklist, keeping it clean and simple. For the first time, students can see exactly what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, and access the appropriate resources to complete the action—all in one place.

In the first term after launch, CQUniversity saw a noticeable reduction in support calls from students who were confused about their next steps, or where they needed to go to complete key forms and other processes. CQU also found they weren’t chasing up so many students for outstanding on-boarding tasks.

For example, since the introduction of MyCQU and the Checklist in late 2020, the university saw 66% more Commonwealth Assistance Forms completed ahead of time: 3,873 forms lodged at the end of January—over a month in advance of Term 1—compared to 2,340 lodged in the previous year.

A survey conducted in April 2021 showed an overwhelmingly positive response to MyCQU, with 82% of new students and 72% of continuing students expressing satisfaction with the platform, and nearly a third of each cohort indicating they were extremely satisfied with MyCQU.