Scholarly
A mock cross-platform scholarship search tool designed to consolidate the process of finding and applying to scholarships to help ensure brighter futures for students.
Project Duration
July 2022 - August 2022
Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Responsibilities
User research, wireframing, prototyping, user testing, design iteration, and accounting for accessibility.
Tools
The Problem
Applying to college and scholarships is a tedious and overwhelming process that students can struggle to stick with given their busy schedules balancing academics, extracurriculars, and sometimes even part-time work. It is made even more overwhelming when considering the strong influence college has on one’s future.
The Goal
Design an app and responsive website that’ll improve and simplify the college and scholarship application process to help high school students advance their education and secure a brighter future.
Key Challenges and Constraints
Given the time constraint designated by the Google UX certificate program, sourcing participants for user research and then usability studies was a consistent challenge throughout the project. Moreover, it was a challenge to find participants that accurately represented the intended user group of Scholarly — namely high school students applying to college. Concessions were made for the sake of time. Additionally, applying design modifications across all three devices made iteration significantly more time consuming and demanded careful consideration so as to maintain a consistent user experience for each device and associated use case.
Understanding the User
I kicked off user research by learning more about the college application process. I asked interview participants to describe their experiences and how they felt about applying to colleges, for scholarships, federal aid, and institutional aid. Generally, participants found the scholarship application process especially tedious and frustrating since finding legitimate scholarships whose criteria for eligibility applied to them is a constant struggle. This issue is made worse when students are forced to juggle this on top of other academic and extracurricular commitments.
Personas
Developing several personas to break down my research findings helped to refine focus on the user’s needs, goals, and frustrations.
Journey Maps
I walked my user through a basic college application flow, paying close attention to how the user may feel at each step and used that information to identify opportunities for improvement. At this point, I better understood how searching for scholarships stood out from the rest as particularly stressful due to its significant role in dictating college attendance relative to its lack of standardization.
Competitive Audit
I examined two direct competitors in the market, The Common Application and The College Board, to identify strengths and weaknesses in four distinct contexts through the lens of the user. I also revealed general design conventions associated with application processes. As a result, I successfully identified a gap in the market that would focus on consolidating and simplifying the search for scholarships.
Defining the Problem
Pain Points
💵 Lack of standardization with scholarship application — Users expressed frustration over the lack of uniformity with scholarship finders and the means of applying to them. This makes it hard for students to efficiently find valuable and relevant scholarships to afford college.
😵💫 Unsustainable time management demands — The process to fund college is a complicated, oftentimes overwhelming ordeal that demands students to balance it on top of those pre-existing academic and extracurricular commitments.
❓ Uncertainty about the future is cause for additional stress — The uncertainty that students face with this next step in life— whether they’ll be accepted to their college of choice, have the means to attend, or if college is the right choice at all— is cause for a lot of unmanaged stress.
Problem Statement
I wrote out problem statements that drew from my personas to create actionable goals that would guide the project moving forward. At this point I decided to narrow the scope and focus my efforts on scholarships for the sake of feasibility given constraints such as time and since user research revealed a particular frustration aimed at the process of searching for and applying to scholarships while also ensuring a realistic scope given time constraints.
Chantrea is a hard-working high school student who needs an efficient way to find relevant scholarships quickly because she wants to attend a top-ranking university without burdening her family’s financial situation.
Ideating with Crazy 8’s
After rapidly generating a slew of potential design solutions, I fleshed out some of the ideas into a general flow that would fill gaps in the market. This flow would somehow curate a list of relevant scholarships for students, allow them to easily filter results, apply to scholarships, and track application status in-app.
Sitemap
Establishing information architecture with a sitemap allowed me to focus on an overarching layout that guides a simple and intuitive user experience before diving into the specifics.
Giving Form to Ideas with Prototyping
I dove into paper wireframes with a mobile-first approach to accommodate the needs of my user group. Since many students must juggle their academic and extracurricular (or part-time) commitments in addition to scholarships, I envision them spending a lot of time away from home or on the go.
Digital Wireframes
Taking the ideas that seemed to most effectively connect with the user’s goals, I fleshed them out with digital wireframes. I wanted the homescreen to serve as a sort of dashboard for users to view progress toward tuition goals and scholarships they’ve either applied to, will apply to, or are actively applying to.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
With the core flow layed out, I stitched together the screens in preparation for user testing. It was crucial to ensure that users would be able to interact with the prototype fluidly despite it being an early prototype. That means users can progress forward and backward at any point, have sufficient UX copy (rather than filler text) to understand their available actions, and are informed when they have completed the flow.
Collecting Feedback with User Testing
Initial (unmoderated) usability studies revealed generally positive impressions of Scholarly, but also highlighted several aspects that hindered traversal through the flow that I explore further.
Affinity Diagramming
I poured the data from user testing into Jamboard to identify patterns and establish themes, especially regarding pain points, to drive design iteration.
Usability Study Findings
Iterating with Mockups and Hi-fi Prototypes
After a few design iterations that considered the insights extracted from user testing I developed mockups that incorporated color, branding, and other visual design elements while also improving application of gestalt principles to bolster the user experience with more visual and hierarchical clarity.
Accessibility Considerations
Ensured WCAG compliance for colors used to accommodate those with visual impairments
Use of large font sizes, especially header text, clearly signals important sections in the app and reflects an effective information hierarchy for assistive technologies
Considered the amount of information present on each screen to avoid overwhelming users and increase compatibility with assistive technologies like screen readers.
Responsive Design
I repeated the ideation and research processes to develop tablet and desktop counterparts to the Scholarly mobile app. The primary goal with creating a responsive website was to carve out a consistent, uniform experience across each device that takes full advantage of the available screen real estate while not sacrificing any functionality regardless of the device through which Scholarly would be accessed.
Conclusion 🏁
What I Learned
The process of designing and iterating on a responsive website in tandem with a dedicated mobile app requires a uniquely high level of care and consideration especially with regard to time efficiency. Design choices carry significantly more weight since they must be applied to each device/breakpoint to ensure a consistent cross-platform experience. I learned to more carefully synthesize research findings and extract opportunities for improvement before committing to higher fidelity design representations.
Next Steps
Flesh out alternative features of Scholarly such as the college checklist and scholarship registration tools. Start with user interviews and other generative research to build a solid knowledge pool for these distinct use cases.
Conduct additional usability studies to reveal more opportunities for improvement across all devices. How does the experience change across devices? How can I increase consistency?
Procure user testing participants that more accurately represent the intended user group for more effective and insightful research findings (i.e. junior/senior high school students).