Future Student Guide

PROJECT

The Future Student Guide is a quiz style app that is aimed at assisting prospective students with discovering study pathways.

In order to increase applications to the university it is critical that programmes and study pathways can be easily discovered. This project aims to assist mainly college students with discovering study pathways in a fun and engaging way.

Project Goals:

• Boost applications to the University  for college students (new accounts that have completed ncea level 3 within the last year)
• Reduce dropped programmes
• Improve discoverability of programmes
• Reduce bounce rate of programmes pages main website
• Boost session time on programmes pages main website

WIREFRAMES

Wireframes help to establish the content structure for each page. With a focus on providing a seamless user experience we can plan where certain components will sit in order to guide the user towards an objective.

In this case we want them to select cards from a category that appeals to them, this will then start the filtering process and reveal relevant study suggestions later in the flow.

Designs even as early as these are utilised in user testing sessions. The lack of any dominant UI features often reveals interesting insights.

UI TESTS

With the user flow and wireframes established, experiments with Interface style can begin. An objective of the project was to make things fun and to ‘gamify’ the experience, hence the colourful early concepts.

UI REFINEMENTS

With the beginnings of an interface system these designs are ready to be put to the test in user testing sessions.

We invited current students to test our designs. By asking them to complete certain tasks we were able to uncover common pain points with just a handful of participants.

You’ll notice that within the ‘subject interests’ screen on the left the information about each interest is hidden inside a dropdown tab. We found that participants progress was halted when they wanted read the hidden text. This discovery influenced later iterations of the design.

SOLUTION

The final solution balances a playful interface with a purposeful experience.

Swipable cards reduce cognitive load and make browsing information easy and fun.

Large buttons with strong visual feedback when interacted with make it clear when a user has made a selection.

Information is displayed upfront and is always accessible to the user.

Useful features have been included in order to make the transition from college to teritary student more seamless: Users are able to check if they meet prerequisites for their favourite programmes, and they can save programme suggestions and revisit them later.