Creating tailored digital journeys for teachers, parents, and student travelers

EF’s website historically centered prospective Group Leaders (teachers), yet analytics showed that over half of all visitors were actually parents and student travelers—audiences who needed clearer, more accessible information. To better serve all users, we launched a multi-phase initiative to build audience-specific “hub pages” and redesign the entire parent information experience, transforming a static PDF Parent Guide into a dynamic, research-driven Parent Hub. This work created a more intuitive, trustworthy, and conversion-ready experience across the site.

Role UI/UX Designer

Team Maddie Poulin (Copywriter), Lauren Schechinger (UX Designer), Adam Schwartz (Creative Director)

Deliverables Audience-specific sitemap and flows, digital wireframes & patterns, 17 new web page designs

THE CHALLENGE

1. A site designed for teachers—used mostly by parents

The public website emphasized the teacher journey, but 80% of traffic came from parents and travelers, creating a mismatch in expectations and content.

2. A fragmented, outdated parent experience

Parents relied on:

A static Parent Guide PDF
A sparse “How it Works for Parents” page
Enrollment meetings that pressured fast decisions

This left parents feeling uncertain, rushed, and under-informed.

3. No personalized experience (yet)

The long-term vision is a fully personalized homepage for both of our primary audiences. Short-term, we needed a solution that helped users self-identify and find what they needed quickly.

To help users self-select into the right experience, we introduced audience-specific hub pages.

These centralized “tables of contents” route each audience, prospective Group Leaders and parent’s & travelers, to curated information.

THE SOLUTION

The user journey:
eftours.com → audience hub → informational pages

This framework will serve as the backbone for future personalization. Ideally, we’d have a fully personalized eftours.com homepage that recognizes each visitor and tailors their experience automatically. Our technology isn’t quite there yet—but that’s the long-term goal.

Parent decision making study:

Our marketing manager and UX researcher collaborated to conduct a diary study with parents from awareness to enrollment. These were the primary goals:

Identify key factors driving parent’s decision making when enrolling a child on tour
Understand how families evaluate trips

RESEARCH

Demographics & method

20 parents
Conducted over 9 days
Diary study collecting real-time video feedback on thoughts and emotions during the decision making process

Key takeaways

1. Early information gaps caused parents to disengage

2. Over-reliance on recruitment meetings risked enrollment losses

3. Price sensitivity is universal, but value can outweigh cost

4. Student excitement heavily influences parent decisions

Giving parents the right information at the right time to make a confident decision for their travelers

Using insights from the research and a full-site content audit, we built a parent-focused ecosystem around the key questions parents consistently ask:

What is EF & how does educational travel work?
Is my child safe and supported?
How much does this cost & what’s included?
What happens after we enroll?

STRATEGY

Using insights to inform teachers interested in travel before they even have a conversation with sales

Before diving into a conversation with a sales representative, prospective teachers needed to know:

Where can I travel with EF?
What is educational travel and why should I go with EF?
What’s in it for me?

STRATEGY

Discovery & competitive analysis

During the define and design stage of the project, our team took a deep dive into our current site and those of our competitors to better understand where EF content lives today.

Website Audit
Conducted to gather all parent and Group Leader related content across our public website and find information gaps as well as overlapping content.

Sitemap creation
I created a current sitemap as well as an updated sitemap for the new structure of the site. Using the main pain points from the parent study and previous teacher studies as the main sections for each audience hub.

Competitive analysis
We explored both direct educational travel competitors as well as other leaders in the travel and education spaces.

DESIGN EXPLORATIONS

Pattern building

All designer within Education First work with a centralized component library for speed and consistency. Each product then customizes those components for their brand and audience.

EF Tours was going through a brand refresh as this project was underway, so in order to reduce the need for major visual redesigns in the future, I:

Established mobile first, modular patterns to scale across the entire public facing website and allow the web team to build faster
Created patterns using the centralized components that were clean, modular, and easy for future brand updates without disrupting the structure of the page