MyCQU: A Seamless and Personalised Digital Experience for Students

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. There's a lot of information that students need to be across—course and subject details, class timetables, forms, and more. Not only does this vary from student to student, but it can change over time as details are updated or amended. The brief was to co-design a digital experience that was seamless for the user but had the interoperability to work with legacy systems.

MyCQU is a dynamic guide for students to help them get started or continue studying at CQUniversity, fed by data from multiple systems. Improving the overall student experience required a much more guided journey across the digital landscape. The solution needed personalisation from the outset, to cut through the noise and only show content relevant to the individual. 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.

Consolidation of apps and functionalities into MyCQU has reduced the number of systems students need to log in to. The simpler digital landscape has resulted in positive behaviour changes, such as higher uptake of self-service options and faster completion of enrolment processes. CQUniversity saw a noticeable reduction in support calls from students who were confused about next steps, or where they needed to go to complete key tasks. 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.

For MyCQU to be a seamless and personalised digital experience, we needed to understand the requirements and expectations of the vast student body. The challenge was to turn this complexity into a tailored UX layer without the need for sweeping technology replacements. Behind all the improvements to the student experience was one crucial change: capability. Building MyCQU was not just about creating a product, it was about developing new capabilities that would transform the way CQUniversity interacts with its students. Our goals for MyCQU: - 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 - allow for content to be added and easily maintained by CQUniversity content editors