New students at Macquarie University often felt overwhelmed by fragmented communication and inconsistent information across multiple channels. This lack of alignment led to confusion during enrolment and onboarding, making an already high-stakes transition even more stressful.

To address this, we brought together staff from multiple departments through co-design workshops to map the full student journey — from offer to enrolment. This collaborative process uncovered pain points and clarified how different communication channels (emails, web pages, and service centres) interacted.

Before building solutions, I facilitated a competitor benchmarking workshop with representatives from student services. Using dot-voting, teams evaluated onboarding experiences from five local universities, identifying best practices and opportunities for improvement.

Building on these insights, we designed a streamlined service blueprint that aligned messaging and touchpoints across platforms. The blueprint offered a clear roadmap for how and when students should receive information, ensuring consistency and reducing duplication between teams.

The new blueprint helped break down communication silos between departments and created a more unified onboarding experience for students. This work also laid the foundation for the broader Macquarie University Onboarding Experience initiative — a long-term effort to improve key student touchpoints and strengthen overall engagement during transition.

By seeing the experience through students’ eyes and aligning internal teams through co-design, we built not just a smoother process — but a shared understanding of what good student support looks like. It reinforced that lasting change in large organizations happens when empathy, systems thinking, and collaboration work hand in hand.