StudySpy is the digital prospectus for tertiary education in New Zealand. The platform aggregates every course offered in the country, from apprenticeships to university degrees, alongside data on tuition, level, duration, completion rates, and post-graduation employment outcomes — pulling from six different government bodies into one tool prospective students can actually use.
The Brief
Before StudySpy, course information for prospective students was fragmented across hundreds of provider websites and government databases, and a meaningful proportion of it was out of date. Students walking into a careers adviser’s office faced an ocean of pamphlets and brochures from dozens of providers; the digital alternatives were either incomplete, slow, or paywalled. The mission of StudySpy was to consolidate every course in New Zealand into a single, searchable, free-to-use platform with up-to-date data drawn directly from the government source-of-record.
The brand brief had to do something rare: feel approachable to a teenage decision-maker and credible to a tertiary provider’s marketing team and academic registrar. Design that pulls in either direction loses the other.
The Strategic Decision
- Position StudySpy as a tool, not a brand of its own. Students were not shopping for “the StudySpy brand” — they were comparing real courses. The brand had to feel like a useful, fast, trusted tool that got out of the way of the decision.
- Treat data as the hero. The competitive advantage was the data integration: course tuition, completion rates, employment outcomes, scholarships. The visual system was built to make that data the most prominent thing on every screen.
- Design for the smartphone first. Today’s students are digital natives; the experience had to be useful in their pocket. Mobile web and a dedicated Android app shipped together.
Scholarships — Removing the Financial Barrier
StudySpy Scholarships consolidated every NZ tertiary scholarship into one searchable, free database, surfacing more than $70 million in opportunities. Before this, much of that information sat behind paywalls — actively counter to the purpose of scholarships designed for students in financial hardship. The Scholarships product was a category-changing intervention, and Obvious built the brand and visual system to land it as a public-good tool.
Outcomes
- StudySpy became NZ’s most-used course-comparison platform across web and app
- Tertiary providers used the platform to update over 4,000 courses that had been out of date in government systems
- Scholarship visibility transformed: $70+ million of NZ-only opportunities indexed and searchable, free
- Cross-platform creative — including the Weekend Warrior campaign with Whitireia & WelTec on ZM radio — was anchored on the StudySpy platform
Why This Mattered
StudySpy is one of the clearest examples we have worked on of brand work that earns its keep through utility. The visual system is not loud. It does not perform. It gets out of the way of the decision the audience came to make. That is a particular kind of design discipline, and it is harder to do than it looks. We have written more about the principle of restraint over decoration in why visual consistency outperforms visual cleverness.
Services
- Visual identity
- Web platform design
- Mobile app design (Android + iOS)
- Marketing collateral
- Messaging system
Working on a tertiary, education or platform-led brand engagement? Start a conversation.