Study in Taiwan
Making a better connection between potential students and the Taiwan Chinese Center by easily offering students the right information for studying Chinese.
(The proposal was applied by the Ministry of Education.)
Website: Study in Taiwan
Flowchart
Problem
Since Taiwan already has 45 Chinese Centers for international students to study Chinese, the Taiwan Chinese Center needs a way to boost international popularity and increase enrollment. “Study in Taiwan” is the official website of Mandarin Chinese learning, but lacks website visibility.
User & Audience
The website’s target users are international students who currently study in Taiwan and potential Chinese learning students from around the world. These users don’t have high proficiency in Chinese, and may have interest in the education quality, potential career opportunities, and distinguishing features of learning Chinese in Taiwan.
My Role
Participating in a political competition, “National Youth Good Idea”, my two partners and I discussed the best solutions to the problem and analyzed the website together. I was responsible for redesigning the website according to our solution. We also conducted 51 surveys of international students to address user experience and attitudes about the website.
Problem Analysis
By analyzing the reason for low popularity of the Taiwan Chinese Center, we found that the official website, “Study in Taiwan”, did not show Taiwan’s features, prospects, and the difference between learning Chinese in China vs. Taiwan. The official website is the first connection between potential international students and the Taiwan Chinese Center. Easily offering the students the right information for studying Chinese could increase their willingness to study Chinese in Taiwan. Thus, we identified that our solution to the problem was to improve usability of the website.
After careful observation of the thorough operation of the website, we found eight problems worth improving. The top issues included a lack of Taiwanese characteristics, slow updates, and absence of the integration of the 45 Chinese centers in Taiwan.
The Chinese Center on the original website is listed on the right side, without comparison with each other.
Except for ten sharings by international students, the website only puts the introduction of the students and their schools, which lacks characteristics to attract people to read the articles.
The update of the website is slow, and the articles are insufficient, causing potential students doubting the correctness of the information.
People will be easily mistaken by the 10 reasons at the bottom that they could click on them and see more.
The content of the website is only basic Taiwan information, an overview of Chinese learning, and scholarship information, which are not diverse, rich, and attractive for potential students.
Although every article is collocated with a picture, the average word count of the articles are over 400, which makes people tired when reading.
Problem Solving
To address the problems, we incorporated Taiwanese culture and added important content according to international students’ needs, including career information and free Chinese lessons.
More Taiwan information and culture are added to the "Discover Taiwan" section.
Online courses and career information are updated in the News and Events section at the homepage.
Furthermore, we integrated information about the 45 Chinese centers, allowing users to compare the pros and cons between different Chinese centers. We also modified the layout design to provide more intuitive user experience when searching information on the website.
The features of the universities are listed together for users to compare their differences.
The reasons for learning Chinese in Taiwan can now be clicked and see information.
At last, we gave suggestions about emphasizing the authority of the website to gain user trust, and the synchronization with a Facebook fan page to provide updated information and interaction with users.
After entering the university page, there are videos filmed by international students to make users know more about the university in an easy way.
Official links of facebook, instagram, and other official website for learning Chinese in Taiwan are all added to the bottom of the homepage.
Outcome
Our proposal achieved second place in the competition, and it was applied by the Ministry of Education. The website was redesigned according to our proposal.