Each year, college students face roadblocks to graduation due to limited time, money, and course availability. This is how my team and I helped ClassFindr, an edtech startup, in its mission to close the higher education attainment gap.

CHALLENGE
Our team was asked to test and iterate on an existing prototype of ClassFindr’s web platform, to create a high-fidelity MVP of the product.

SOLUTION
A web tool that lets students find and transfer equivalent alternatives to required courses at their home institutions, and a landing page to communicate business value to potential investors.

TEAM
Lovelee Basa
Raymond Dabu
Joyce Su (me)

DURATION
2 week sprint | Aug-Sep 2020

MY ROLE
Project management, point-of-contact, user research, usability testing, prototyping

TOOLS
Adobe XD, Miro

KICKOFF

SECONDARY RESEARCH

Understanding the problem space

To get a better understanding of the industry and problem space, we conducted secondary research consisting of 3 parts: looking over the previous team's research, a competitive analysis, and a SWOT analysis of the existing prototype.

USABILITY TESTS

How do students feel about the current prototype?

We conducted usability tests on the current prototype with 5 college students, with the goals of testing ease of navigation and validating various UI elements. Here are some of the tasks and questions we asked:

Sample Tasks:

• Take 3 minutes to navigate the homepage, then create an account.

• Find more information on a class you are interested in.

• You decide to sign up for a class - show me what you would do next.

Sample Post-Test Questions:

• How did you feel about navigating through this prototype?

• What were the best/worst things about the process of finding your next class?

USER INTERVIEWS

The missing piece of the puzzle: college advisors

While there was very little previous research on college employees, we recognized the importance of this user group to the success of the product. We conducted 2 user interviews with college employees (unfortunately, we weren’t able to get in touch with many people, as our project timeline coincided with the beginning of the school year). These are some of the questions we asked:

• What does the credit transfer process look like at your university?

• Are there any pain points you experience throughout this process?

• If a school were to decide to partner with ClassFindr, who would make that decision?

CHALLENGES

Questions left unanswered…

Since ClassFindr is still in the process of building university partnerships, there was gray area that we didn’t know how to design for, such as revenue source and how the various schools’ databases would integrate with the product. We spoke to our clients and agreed upon two assumptions that we used to help us make our design decisions moving forward:

Assumption 1: Universities will adopt this as a toolkit included in student tuition (an added value product that universities will adopt, and pay for).

Assumption 2: Early MVP product will have a form to submit to home institution. Future iterations may include a form to get permissions from the outside institution from which credits are being transferred.

UPDATED OBJECTIVES

Adding to our original objective of building a hi-fidelity MVP

Based on our research…

• Even though advisors face very different credit transfer processes depending on the university they work at, we thought it would be beneficial in communicating the value of the product if we designed an advisor facing side of the platform.

• The current materials are only communicating to students, so we wanted to design a landing page specifically for potential investors or university partners.

BRAND WORKSHOP

Identifying ClassFindr’s brand personality

Once we had a new direction to go in, we conducted a brand workshop where we identified ClassFindr's brand personality. Since ClassFindr is in the business of higher education, we decided they should come off as trustworthy and friendly, but also independent to reflect its mission to empower students to design their own graduation paths.

MOOD BOARD & STYLE TILE

Defining visual elements that reflect ClassFindr’s collegiate brand

Once we identified ClassFindr’s personality, Raymond put together a mood board and style tile for us to work off of for the design. ClassFindr already had a logo (pictured on the style tile), which helped to give us a visual direction.

DESIGN STUDIO

Three minds are better than one

To start generating ideas for layouts, we conducted a design studio activity during which we each sketched ideas for layouts and combined the best features of each design to provide a starting point for wireframing.

WIREFRAMES

Bringing our sketches to life

We then turned our sketches into wireframes and conducted 2 usability tests to pinpoint any aspects of the user flow that were unintuitive.

EARLY DESIGNS

Trying out different visual design ideas

Once we ironed out some of the kinks in our wireframes, we began adding in visual design elements. We conducted desirability tests on 2 iterations of the design - the first (pictured left) was seen as simple, clean, modern, but uninspired. The second (pictured right) was seen as simple, but generic).

STUDENT PROTOTYPE

Students can search classes and send transfer requests to their advisors

This video walks through the user flow for a student searching for a class and sending a transfer request to their advisor. You can also see the various interactions we incorporated.

INVESTOR LANDING PAGE

Showing the value of ClassFindr to investors

This video scrolls through the investor landing page, designed to communicate the value of the product to potential investors.

ADVISOR PROTOTYPE

A rough concept mockup of the advisor-facing platform

Lastly, we created a dashboard for the advisor-facing side of the platform.