George Fox University has a mission it takes literally: every student known. For most prospective students, the first test of that promise is not a campus visit or a phone call. It is the website. A 17-year-old and their parents land on a tuition page, and within a minute they decide whether this school feels approachable or whether it feels like a wall of higher education jargon.

Sierra Ratcliff is the designer responsible for that first impression. She joined George Fox in 2020, and today she is the senior web designer on a four-person web team inside the marketing department.

When the Person Who Built It Can't See It Anymore

Sierra took point on user testing about a year ago, when the director of digital strategy went on paternity leave and the work needed a new owner. She came to it as a designer, not a researcher, and she ran straight into the oldest problem in design.

The team had tested before, with UserTesting.com, and stopped. The cost made no sense for what George Fox actually needed. They were not launching new products every quarter. They needed to know where people got tripped up on the site they already had, and whether the language landed with first generation students, parents, and high schoolers. Instead, testing came with a budget large enough to distort the work.

Small Tests, Asked Often

Userbrain changed the unit of testing. Instead of large tests scheduled around a contract, Sierra runs about 3 tests every 2 weeks, often with just 3 testers each, spreading them across different questions rather than piling them onto one.

The other thing that made testing fit higher education was reaching the right people. Screening questions let Sierra put a page in front of exactly the audience whose reaction matters: parents of college students, current students, high schoolers weighing their options, or people who have never been to college at all and are meeting university vocabulary for the first time.

She writes and launches the tests, watches the sessions, and sends clips to the team. AI Insights gives her the summary that orients her before she starts, but the videos are the point.

The Biggest Page Update in Years, Shipped with Confidence

Then came the tuition page, the highest-stakes page on the site and the biggest website update George Fox had made in years. Cost is the question every prospective family arrives with, and the page had to carry a lot of content without burying anyone in admissions terminology.

Sierra's solution was a tab system splitting first year and transfer information, a pattern the university had never used anywhere on its website. New patterns are exactly where a team without research support usually guesses. Instead, she tested the mockups, rebuilt what the sessions told her to rebuild, then built a live test page and tested that too, running several rounds before the developer wired up the final version. The page shipped on evidence.

The same approach fixed the campus visit portal, where testers revealed that finding an available date meant clicking into the calendar repeatedly, and the dates never showed which events were actually happening. The team rewrote the entire flow.

Findings That Leave the Web Team

The most interesting change is where the insights end up. Sierra sends clips to the developer when everyone trips on the same element. When something bigger surfaces, it travels to the admissions and operations teams, and suddenly a small web team is influencing decisions well beyond its own remit.

Across a marketing team where almost nobody had seen user testing before, watching real people move through the site has become something people look forward to. Sierra's plan from here is a steady pulse of exploratory testing on the pages that matter most, so the team never has to wonder how the site feels to someone seeing it for the first time.

Results at a Glance