General Assembly is a global upskilling, reskilling, and talent provider that serves learners, organizations, and governments. Skills-based programs in Software Engineering, Data Science, Data Analytics, UX Design, Digital Marketing, and AI are delivered through free classes, workshops, short courses, bootcamps, employee skilling programs, hire-train-deploy, and apprenticeships. To better meet the needs of their learners, company partners, and employees, General Assembly needed updated tech – ranging from a refreshed UX to better backend systems. 

Services
Experience & Product Design
Platforms & Engineering

Industry
Education

Market
United States

Tech Partners
Sitecore

General Assembly sought a partner with deep design, SEO, martech, and UX expertise to efficiently lead the revamp in a truly collaborative fashion. The ideal partner would effectively bring together multiple systems and tech platforms to create and enable the best experiences for each audience.

Merkle quickly designed, developed, and executed a martech implementation and creative refresh to meet the needs of General Assembly’s front-end and back-end users. Keys to success included:

• Merkle and General Assembly working together to optimally leverage existing and new systems to build a modern composable digital experience platform with Sitecore XM Cloud that supports a scalable, efficient self-service model.

• New creative, fueled by research-backed industry best practices and competitive insights, to bring a fresh look to the learner experience. 

• Deep collaboration on performance optimizations to drive lead generation with UX improvements, like the styling of call-to-action buttons and reformulating pages to better position those buttons for usability and visitor-to-lead conversion.

• Migrating and launching the site in a phased approach to quickly realize value while mitigating risk. 

• Careful analytics monitoring to flag any performance or SEO issues quickly and address them in a timely fashion before expanding the roll-out to other areas of the site.

Learners now enjoyed:

1. Personalized content based on their geography and dynamically updated content across the website via Vercel.
   
   
2. Website accessibility, with WCAG 2.0 AA compliance implemented as part of the project.
   
   
3. Easier discoverability on search engines due to SEO improvements.
   
   
4. More intuitive and aesthetically pleasing on-site experiences.

General Assembly’s marketing team could:

1. Make back-end updates quickly without requiring significant development work. Some updates that used to take weeks are now viable in less than a day.
   
   
2. Dynamically refresh content on static pages.
   
   
3. Get better insights and make data-informed decisions thanks to the back-end connection between Google Analytics, Vercel, and other elements of the tech stack.
   
   
4. Improve media ads with more intuitive, relevant landing pages for users to improve conversion rates.

With a modern SaaS-based composable DXP in place, General Assembly has enhanced user experiences, improved operational efficiency, and positioned itself for sustainable, scalable future growth.