Leading global UX design, service design and user research for Cambridge University Press & Assessment (CUPA) across major international B2B platforms.
Information architecture and service design for the ‘My Cambridge’ key interactions, connecting schools to the Cambridge International School Support Hub.
My contract with CUPA began as a short two-month engagement to conduct a UX review and analysis of the existing Cambridge International platform, School Support Hub used by schools worldwide to teach the Cambridge curriculum. The quality of this initial discovery phase led to a swift expansion of my remit, ultimately placing me in charge of driving user-validated service design across two of the institution’s most critical global digital transformation programmes.
The immediate challenge centred on the migration of the Cambridge International platform to the new custom CMS, Teach Cambridge. While the business aimed to preserve what was successful during the move, Teach Cambridge was plagued by consistent negative user feedback, particularly concerning its taxonomy and navigation. This strategic deficiency created a risk that the migration would undermine the quality of interaction associated with the prestigious Cambridge brand.
Addressing this critical risk, I successfully proposed and mandated a comprehensive user-validated research programme, engaging staff and institutional users across Europe, the USA, and Asia. The research confirmed our initial response from users: the older platform offered a better user experience. I used this evidence to present six core design improvements to the Teach Cambridge product teams, necessitating a strategic and sensitive intervention to align their development roadmap with modern best practice before the migration could proceed.
To define the ideal end-state, I orchestrated an extensive series of nine design workshops and conducted interviews with internal users (customer support, product) and 12 external users (Exams Officers and Teachers). This intensive research revealed the need for seven core UX recommendations. These were crucial functional requirements, including the ability for Exams Officers to implement proper Multi-Centre Management and gain visibility on whether teachers had completed compulsory training.
I translated these validated insights into detailed design artefacts: comprehensive journey maps, service blueprints, and high-fidelity Figma prototypes. These prototypes were used to rapidly secure buy-in from heads of department and analysts, illustrating critical service improvements such as creating a configurable dashboard with a 'favourite services' flow, and implementing clearer role-based access controls to reduce administrative burden on busy school staff.
The engagement culminated in a complete service design overhaul, informed by over 20 design workshops, 40 user research studies, and thousands of critical feedback data points. I ensured the resulting strategy was not confined to the internal platforms, but extended to collaboration with the external Drupal front-end team to align the consumer-facing website with our user-validated findings. The most satisfying metric, however, was realised at the close of the programme: returning to the original users we spoke to showed a measurable increase in satisfaction, validating the entire user-centred initiative and delivering an experience worthy of the Cambridge University brand.
