How do we make college prep better?

TourGenius (currently in the pre-launch stage) is a tool that helps students take comprehensive notes when visiting colleges. This helps them make informed and confident decisions.

Our Scope:

Our team was given the task of researching and creating a dashboard for the school counselors who would be helping students prepare for college. This tool would allow counselors to view the data that their students input into their notes on the student side of the TourGenius app.

My Role

My Role:

I carried out a variety of tasks on our team, including:

wireframing
prototyping
user research
data synthesis
project management

Our client's problem

Our overworked guidance counselor, with too little resources and a plethora of students to guide daily, needs an efficient, easy-to-use dashboard to access student data and notes from college campus tours so they can:

know students’ preferences and takeaways from college tours
access student information quickly and easily

Here's what we're working with

We organized data points from initial round of interviews in an affinity diagram

Our exploratory research and initial interviews told us:

There is an average of one counselor for every 455 K-12 students
Guidance counselors need to give personalized attention to students to help them be successful in choosing the right college

There is a lack of a good, comprehensive, and centralized way to input, track and retrieve student data (as one user told us "we gather students information on excel spreadsheet")

Project Objectives

How we can help: In a nutshell

Maximize the counselor’s time
Streamline the college prep process
Give easy and quick access to the students’ college tour journal entries
Give guidance counselors an easy-to-learn tool to avoid frustration

The Happy User-Story: The end Goal

In the end, what we wanted to do was boost the ease and productivity of guidance counselors, who can already be stretched so thin.

Early Concept Wireframes

Putting our first concepts in front of users

Counselor Dashboard

streamlining the college prep process with at-a-glance

key data

Student Profile

Giving Counselors crucial data in an instant

Student Journal Entry

Allows counselors to view

data input by students on college visits.

School Search Tool

Gives advanced college

search options

What we learned from usability testing

Listening to users: learning what we needed to do better

"I would add a type of rating or ranking system so i could see how each student feels about schools"

"I cant find the notes. Doesn't seem to be serving the purpose of the app"

Additionally, there was doubt expressed in these areas

Whether or not student and school financial information feature on the tool would be accurate

whether or not the college search function would be used in our tool, especially when such a function already exists in Scoir, an already existing tool for college prep.

Refocusing

Getting back to the core need

My first prototype veered somewhat off-course. We learned we should:

Focus on: counselor dashboard and college tour journal entries

Not focus on: trying to replace already existing tools.
Move away from focusing on financial details and financial matching of students with certain schools.

I decided that I should replace the school search tool with a school data page, which would give the counselor a quick overview of what their student body was saying and feeling about various schools.

Final Wireframes

Leveling up the School Counselor’s dashboard experience

School Counselor Dashboard

Updated Student Profile

Spreadsheet Report

Updated Student Journal Entry

These wireframes were part of a final prototype that was tested with users

What our prototype delivers to users:

a streamlined way for busy guidance counselors to quickly assess their current status in respect to college admissions prep
a convenient way to access the notes that students put into their TourGenius entries
Less guesswork in knowing where each student is in their college prep journey
Some idea of what their students are feeling/saying about various colleges

How our users felt about the final prototype

"this feature is worth its weight in gold...I really need that like, right now"

"Simplistic and not overwhelming. A lot of information but not TOO much or overwhelming. It doesn’t feel like it’s being thrown at me."

"Schools page! I think because of the work that I do with students, this information all in one spot is a gold mine. The aggregation of information is blowing my mind…”

Some aspects that our users indicated could use improvement:

Some users found some aspects superfluous, such as having journal entries in multiple locations

Some data wasn’t entirely clear in it’s meaning/purpose/origin

Future Recommendations

If we had unlimited time to work on this project, we'd like to:

Combine College Visits/Schools page and into a page that features easy-to-digest and visually accessible insights on what students are feeling and saying about various schools, and how they’re rating them.
Further refine which student info is critical to make the most prominent on profiles in order to help counselor aid the students in the college prep process
Explore ways to make information easy to fill out for students
Further develop making info visually accessible and simplified

Final thoughts

This project helped teach me the importance of defining one’s scope and feature prioritization. As UX designers, I’d venture to say that we’d all love to create the end-all-be-all solution for our clients and users, however, we can’t risk overreaching and clinging to our original ideas at the risk of not addressing the most urgent user needs at the time, in the most feasible way.