Schools and Programs

Lead Designer | Timeline - Dec 2021 - March 2022 | Platform - Responsive Web App

Context

These pages are essential to ApplyBoard, as there is all relevant information pertaining program intakes, features, and requirements. This project was a redesign to mitigate current problems based on feedback from internal sales (IRMs), content, and marketing teams at ApplyBoard while interacting with RPs.

My Team

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

  • Product Owner (Daryan Zycki)

  • Team of Developers

My Role

Throughout this project, I was responsible for understanding the problem space from internal stakeholders. This meant…

  • Conducting stakeholder interviews to determine current pain-points and explore opportunities to create a better experience.

  • Provide design proposals to feedback from stakeholders, and gain alignment.

  • Developing web-based mobile mockups to reflect desktop prototypes.

Internal stakeholder Research

I conducted 10 internal interviews - 45-60 minutes in length and the following information was concluded. This included internal team members from sales, content, marketing and other domains.

Assumptions
RP’s/Students are battling with identifying relevant information regarding school/program due to inconsistencies in language and visual hierarchy.

What did we want to learn?

  • Current state and user behaviour.

  • Content - Information pertaining to each user.

  • History for design decisions.

    What did we learn?

  • Establishing different requirements based on user type (Student vs. RP)

  • Visual hiearchy and lack of information - lacked ability to become a “source of truth”

Defining the problem

How might we help RPs and Students find, locate information regarding a particular school, and action on it?

Information Architecture

Major focus on shifting attention from simple UI to content. Focus on elements that need to be modified, deleted and added. Helped ensure that stakeholders had more focus on the elements rather than the visual design of the page, in order to establish some baseline assumptions for pain-points and establish the history of design choices.

Ideation to SolutioN

Below are a few images to illustrate the final designs of the product built. There were several iterations built - mainly felt like a project that was hard to handle and ensure feedback loops were kept short with many internal stakeholder involvement. Documentation became increasingly important in a project of this nature. As this was our final design prototype this meant that I was able to hand it off to development. This is where devs begin implementing the bulk of the experience with design supporting them through this process. As a design lead...

  • Generated and owned the final high fidelity designs for release and post release - Design QA.

  • Working alongside UIE team to ensure we could add net new components into our Crystal Design System 2.0.

  • Work closely with product/dev to ensure the MVP was feasible and responsive.

Results

Increased User Engagement

  • Post Launch - 1.6 Million Views

  • Opt-In - 16% of users old view, 84% opt in new view

  • Average Time Session increased in x5 on mobile - 19.3% more mobile users accessing the page 30 days post launch

User Retention

  • New unique users prior and post launch - 19.3% more mobile users accessing the page 30 days post launch for the first time.

Learnings

  1. Project Ownership

    This project was one that hopped around each product pod as it was a platform level project. It required many different internal stakeholders to understand what may be needed for each unique user and the information that needed to be surfaced.

  2. UXD - User Experience Document

    It is important to define the success of a given project. This would help with understanding requirements and reduce the number of active feedback loops.

  3. Feedback Documentation

    It is key to understand what is being captured amongst so many internal stakeholders. It is clear that this project was handled by many designers, due to the nature of the project - its important to capture previous design decisions.

4. Validation

Although in this case, I believe that we did have some metrics to measure the success prior and post launch It would have been important to understand and validate some of these decision through interviews as we were mainly relying on internal stakeholder interviews to validate decisions