ApplyBoard CRM

Lead Designer | Timeline - Sept 2021 - May 2022 | Platform - Web App

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Context

What is an RP?

Imagine them as a middleman, similar to a real-estate agent. They act as a buffer between ApplyBoard and the student. They are here to sell programs to students and ensure an easy journey towards their destination country,

Why build a CRM?

It is a cornerstone for our RP strategy — this tool was chosen to help increase their usage of the platform, ensuring RP’s use ApplyBoard more than just application processing, as well as collecting their data.

My Team

  • Product Designer (Tabinda — hey, thats me!)

  • Product Manager (Raphael) / Product Owner (Daryan Zycki)

  • Team of Developers

My Role

Throughout my role as the product designer on the RPJ pod, I was responsible for was the largest initiative which is the ApplyBoard CRM. I was responsible for the initial research project to help guide our future decisions, but also to better understand the journey from lead to student from the RP’s perspective.

✍️ Writing user research plan with established assumptions and conducting interviews with users.

🔍 Filtering + analyzing research to establish key findings in order to being ideating.

🗣 Presenting design prototypes during weekly pod sprint demos for developers.

The Process

  • Discovery Research: 2 weeks of recruiting — 2 weeks of interviews — < 1 week of research analysis

  • Iteration 1 - 3 weeks

  • Iteration 2 - 3 weeks

  • Final Product — Next Steps (what I would suggest)

Research

Over the course of 2 weeks, I was able to schedule a total of 8 interviews for about a 45-60 minute session. I was able to recruit from multiple markets, diversifying our sample, as well as the size of the organization. I started my week off alongside my project manager, Raphael, whom had a wealth of knowledge of the education industry.

We began to test with testing our assumptions — assuming that the recruitment partners current pain-point was organizing and storing data regarding their leads.

Insights

Based on my interviews, there were a few key take-aways that were worthy of highlighting. After reviewing the findings, I had concluded that the initial hypothesis served (semi) true for particular organization sizes.

  • Larger organizations — were already using paid CRMs they were comfortable with using.

  • Small - Medium organizations — portion of participants expressed issues with centralized location of information while others were comfortable with their own method of organization — as they did not have many leads to begin with.

After consulting my findings with my product manager, it was clear that — we needed to identify where we stress our efforts and leverage these insights. The proposal is that the CRM remain a free tool for larger RPs so they may feel inclined to use AB to reduce costs for their business. As for the smaller/medium RPs, my suggestions surrounded around the idea of having much more mobile friendly tools, as many of these RP’s rely on Whatsapp, or their own mobiles to keep track of their information regarding their leads.

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insights to design decisions

  • Establishing key points of the journey from lead to applicant, this includes the language used amongst users to define each point of the student journey,

  • Common methods of how RP’s currently organize their business— many RP’s suggested they would like one centralized location to organize their leads — some larger RP’s were already using a paid CRM (kanban board).

  • 18% of users use Applyboard end to end to manage their leads (most are using spreadsheet, pen and paper or an existing CRM)

Ia + User Journey

  • Developing IA and flow of the CRM — establishing main set of screens such as archiving students and student timeline and how to align with stakeholders in order to incrementally release these features.

  • Developing high-fidelity prototype of CRM - curating a list of journey steps based on research — including industry specific terminology and mental model.

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Solution

Below are a few images to illustrate the final designs of the product built. Many design decisions leveraged existing or ongoing research projects (quick search) to help identify what is important to capture for each card, as well as filters.

Results

Increased User Engagement

  • form of opt-in for the new kanban view (2,852 users)

  • RP’s actioning on their leads (20,802 students applications actioned)

Learnings

  1. Post Release Validation

    Sadly, this was a project I had to leave behind as it was I was in between jobs. However, its important to note that the my recommended next steps would include a second set of testing. Based on some metrics, there was a very low task completion rate for the “add new student modal” (56%). How might we improve this metric - perhaps the solution is the length of the form, maybe it’s the required fields, or maybe there is not enough error validation? The only way to know is to test.

  2. Consideration for Design System

    It is important to understand that a lot of this work also required developer collaboration. It became very apparent that in order to create a responsive web application - there were several considerations about interactions and any creating net new components such as the cards and filter drawer.