If you’ve ever tried to complete an online course and found yourself clicking in circles, searching for basic information or unsure where to go next, you’ve experienced a common challenge. For students, these moments are more than minor frustrations. They shape their perception of the institution. As their expectations shift, students are evaluating institutions of higher education in new ways, and many of these institutions are still working to fully align their structures to support these expectations.
The Shift: Experience as a Signal of Trust
For decades, higher education has competed on programs, reputation and outcomes. Those factors still matter, but expectations are expanding. Students increasingly value clarity and ease in how they navigate institutional systems. They compare institutions not only on their offerings but on how easy it is to explore options, enroll, access support and make progress.
In many institutions, this shift is already visible. Students are evaluating their experiences against other digital interactions in their lives. When systems or platforms are difficult to navigate, it can introduce uncertainty about the broader experience. When experiences are clear and intuitive, confidence builds. The opportunity for institutions is to more intentionally manage experience as part of how trust is built.
The Reality: Fragmented Systems, Fragmented Decisions
Higher education operates within a highly distributed environment. Work is spread across academic units, administrative functions and technical teams. Systems are often implemented at different times, owned by different groups and designed to meet specific needs. Decision making reflects this structure, with multiple layers of governance and competing priorities.
In this context, the student experience can feel disconnected, even when individual systems are functioning as intended. Across conversations with UX teams in higher education, a consistent theme is that there is often not a single, shared view of the end-to-end student experience. Feedback exists in many forms, but that data is not always brought together in a way that reflects the full experience or identifies the key opportunities for improvement.
The Missing Capability: Turning Insight into Action
User experience (UX) research is often introduced at the level of usability or interface improvement, but its role can be broader. At its core, UX research brings structured insight into how students experience institutional systems. It makes visible what is otherwise difficult to see:
- Where are students getting stuck?
- What is creating confusion or unnecessary effort?
- What is getting in the way of progress?
- What can we do to improve the experience, and what should a great experience look like?
- Student feedback from surveys
- Support tickets and call center interactions
- Insights from advisors, faculty and frontline staff
- Focus on high-impact moments in the student journey
- Conduct focused research efforts
- Share findings in ways that are concrete and actionable with the people who can drive change across products, services and systems.
The challenge for UX researchers in higher education today is less about generating insight and more about connecting that insight to action within complex institutional environments. Without a clear path to implementation, even well-supported insights can fail to result in meaningful improvement. When issues span systems, teams or governance structures, acting on them requires coordination, clarity of ownership and alignment with existing priorities. This is where institutions are continuing to evolve.
Why This Matters Now
Students today have more options and are making decisions in a more dynamic landscape. Alternative pathways, shorter-term credentials and workforce-aligned programs are expanding. At the same time, students are placing increased emphasis on efficiency and return on investment. In this environment, experience plays a meaningful role in how they evaluate institutions. It shapes first impressions, influences day-to-day engagement and affects whether students feel confident continuing. What may appear as isolated usability issues often reflect broader barriers to persistence. When these moments accumulate across the student journey, they can impact engagement, delay progress and increase the effort required to stay on track. As expectations continue to evolve, the ability to identify student needs and improve the online student experience is becoming an increasingly important part of how institutions support success and business metrics.
A Practical Way Forward
Improving the student experience does not require a complete overhaul, but it does require a different starting point. Most institutions already have access to valuable signals:
The opportunity is to bring these inputs together, identify patterns and focus attention on the parts of the experience that matter most. User experience researchers are at the heart of this work, connecting data, surfacing insights and helping organizations see the experience more clearly, despite often being under-resourced teams within institutions. From there, progress can be targeted. Some issues face constraints from systems and vendors, but many do not, and those are where progress can begin.
Rather than attempting to fix everything at once, institutions can do the following:
The goal is to enable better, more informed decisions, with students at the center of those decisions across the organization. This work creates shared understanding across teams and helps align groups that typically operate independently.
From Projects to Experience
Most work in higher education is structured as projects, but improving the student experience requires shifting focus to the end-to-end journey those projects collectively create, introducing better visibility into the student journey, clearer ownership of decision making across the experience and stronger operational workflows between insight and decision making. User experience research can support this shift if it is positioned as part of how work gets done, not as a separate activity. In practice, it expands the UX researcher’s role in online higher education. They are not just conducting studies but helping teams understand the experience, connecting insights across systems and ensuring that learning translates into action. They act as connective tissue across teams, bringing visibility to where the experience breaks down and helping the organization align around what to do next.
This work is complex and requires navigating governance, legacy systems and competing priorities, but the cost of inaction is becoming harder to ignore. It is essential to improve how decisions are made, how teams collaborate and how institutions prioritize improvements to the student experience. Online higher education is entering a period where experience is becoming a primary factor in how institutions are evaluated and how students decide where to invest their time. The institutions that adapt will not necessarily be the ones with the most advanced technology. They will be the ones who clearly understand the student experience, recognizing where it is breaking down, where student needs are changing, and taking action based on that understanding. For many, that work has already started. For others, the opportunity is still ahead, and the responsibility to act has never been greater.
Authors note: This article draws on themes from my forthcoming book on user experience research in higher education to be published with Routledge (an imprint of Taylor & Francis).
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