Reinventing the U.S. College Application Experience for
Chinese Students
Role Lead UX/UI Designer
Client ZLX Inc.
Duration Aug 2015 - May 2016
The Challenge
Design a platform to provide recapitulative college information and quality application strategy services.
The Impact
Around mid 2016, after using this app to demonstrate the team's vision, 3 venture capital firms expressed their interests in investment.
The Outcome
An information hub that allows applicants to accelerate their decision-making process on future colleges;
A social network that connects applicants with experienced and suitable application strategy consultants;
An education platform that provides customized courses to formulate the best application strategy.
All in one iOS application.
Defining The Problem
Market Opportunity
Most of the application processes can be broken down into two stages.
To explore opportunities for improvement, I broke down the stages into smaller steps. All steps are required for application and need to be planned carefully.
For Chinese students, two major problems make the process unproductive:
Scattered information
Currently, applicants have to jump between numerous ranking lists and college news sites to formalize a list of target colleges.
Costly consulting services
A pool of 520,000 Chinese applicants creates a huge market for application consulting. To get a fair quality consulting service, a student needs to spend an average $20,000 (equivalent to 1/3 of average Chinese family income).
We decided to make the application experience better, and cheaper.
But before moving forward, I conducted user research to drive our strategy and design effort.
User Research
5 phone interviews with active college applicants allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the actual challenges they are facing.
Scattered, and lengthy
Surrounded by numerous school analysis resources, applicants often found themselves more confused and distracted. They are looking for a simple system that delivers the recapitulative school information.
Not costly, but inefficient consulting services
Surprisingly, the applicants are not worried about the cost as long as the consultant can develop a personalized efficient strategy. The real challenge is to find quality and personalized consulting services.
Refined Problem
5 phone interviews with active college applicants allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the actual challenges they are facing.
Insights from User Research
These are included in the below persona.
User Pain Points determined Core Functions
Application Strategy
Connect students with experienced consultants
School Repository
Provide a central location for quality school information
Below, I use the function "School Repository" to demonstrate me thought process.
Decided on What Information is Needed
Data from user interview helped me prioritize needed information into three levels. I then organized them into three screens.
Level 1 - First thing an applicant wants to know
School Ranking
Level 2 - Information for decision-making
School Location, Application Deadline, Popular Majors, Total Expenses
Level 3 - Information for the application process
Detail Information about Admission
Screen 1 to show school ranking
Screen 2 to show high-level school information, admission information, and expense information
Screen 3 to show detail admission information
Reframing The Problem
Sketches
Screen 1 focuses on showing ranking information.
For Screen 2, I focused on exploring a clean organization to display information in groups.
For Screen 3, I adapted the layout from Screen 1 and 2 to keep consistency. Meanwhile, I wanted to make sure users can locate to detail information easily.
Wireframes and App Flows
Wireframes to arrange the app structure.
App flow chart to describe the detailed user experience through the app.
Prototypes, User Testing, and Iterations
I conducted 4 rounds of guerrilla usability testings to verify my design. I then updated the design based on user feedback, which is listed below.
Ideating the Solution
Ranking is the #1 key when comparing schools
Along with that, the applicants also want to know if the school offers the desired major, if the living cost is affordable, and if the environment meets his/her expectation.
Acceptance Rate is crucial
Surprisingly, the applicants may not apply for the school that has a higher ranking but a low acceptance rate. It is because of the level of effort they put into application preparation.
Deadlines are often overlooked
These are included in the below persona.
Application Strategy
Connect students with experienced consultants
School Repository
Provide a central location for quality school information
Below, I use the function "School Repository" to demonstrate me thought process.
Data from user interview helped me prioritize needed information into three levels. I then organized them into three screens.
Level 1 - First thing an applicant wants to know
School Ranking
Level 2 - Information for decision-making
School Location, Application Deadline, Popular Majors, Total Expenses
Level 3 - Information for the application process
Detail Information about Admission
Screen 1 to show school ranking
Screen 2 to show high-level school information, admission information, and expense information
Screen 3 to show detail admission information
Sketches
Screen 1 focuses on showing ranking information.
For Screen 2, I focused on exploring a clean organization to display information in groups.
For Screen 3, I adapted the layout from Screen 1 and 2 to keep consistency. Meanwhile, I wanted to make sure users can locate to detail information easily.
Wireframes and App Flows
Wireframes to arrange the app structure.
App flow chart to describe the detailed user experience through the app.
Prototypes, User Testing, and Iterations
I conducted 4 rounds of guerrilla usability testings to verify my design. I then updated the design based on user feedback, which is listed below.
Here's the Outcome
Color Scheme + Font Families
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Open Sans
Functional Prototype
Core Function No.1 - Application Strategy
The app connects student
Core Function No.2 - School Repository
The app starts with a comprehensive list of schools (left view), followed with sections of critical application information (middle view). Depends on the levels of detail you need, you may drill down to the next level for more information (right view).
LESSON LEARNED
Persuasion
Since all of the team members are not familiar with user research, at the beginning of the development, I had to constantly remind them the importance of understanding users and the importance of design requirements, I even conducted user research alone. UX designers have a lot of opportunities to work with professional or clients from various areas, but that means there are chances that co-workers or clients are not familiar with UX, which leads to the situation that they don't want to invest time to conduct user research or usability testings. As a UX designer, we don't have to force them to admit the value of doing user research or conducting user testings. Instead, what we need to do is to persuade them to let us do our job.
But, how? Yes, it depends.