Personalized, Equitable College Messaging

The College Messaging Platform

I worked as a Design Lead at Scoir to create experiences for students, families, and colleges. The project encompassed 3 audiences and platforms, and focused on creating experiences for colleges to communicate in personalized ways with potential students. My responsibility was to explore potential functionality and design that would create personalized messages for high school students, with automation and little work required on the college administrator’s side.

  • Tools

    • Figma + Sketch

    • Google Docs (Research)

    • Jira

    • Asana

  • Team

    • 3 Engineers

    • 1 Product Manager

    • 1 Executive Stakeholder

    • 1 Lead Designer (me!)

  • Duration

    5 months

    September 2020

    to January 2021

  • Responsibilities

    • Product Design Lead

    • Concept Development

    • Branding Illustration and UI

    • Researcher and Tester

Goals

Create an equitable and fair, personalized messaging platform that is part of the Scoir ecosystem.

Potential college students were having trouble finding new schools that matched their interests. Most students chose colleges their parents recommended. We wanted students to connect personally with colleges, and explore more.

What are we solving?

Provide a way for students to view personalized content on the Scoir network. Encourage students to build a college list that reflects their own interests.

Who is this for?

Existing Scoir Students, signed up with accounts for the platform.

Challenges and Constraints

Work within the existing Scoir application, which already had notifications built in.

Create a net new product for Colleges to send out messages

Make sure message sending is anonymous, but allow colleges to filter when sending so they are assured the message is reaching the right audiences

Don’t jam up student’s inboxes with tons of messages they don’t want.

Explore and Discover

  • Student Data

    Collect relevant info from students to suggest colleges

    Step through more data each time students log in

    Build trust

    Update feed as preferences are created

  • Recommendations Feed

    Create a randomized feed of matching schools

    Insert College Content into the feed to boost engagement and exploration

Personalized Messages

  • Preferences

    Students input preferences

    Colleges then populate in the UI as matches

  • College Content

    Colleges can provide rich and dynamic content about their schools

    Photo and campus features

    Blog style articles on their profile

    Important messaging announcements, i.e. waiver of fees

  • Recommended Schools

    A feed of content, with dynamic content types

    Sessions, Talk with Students, Virtual Tours

    Explore colleges by the content they offer

    Don’t rely on name recognition

Content Creation

Colleges have the ability to create messages, content, articles, and events.

A friendly UI lets colleges create an automated drip campaign for messages to send out to interested students. This avoids one-off sends and messaging fatigue.

Student Experience

Students can now see matches, follow colleges, and receive messages from schools. The schools can only target based on what the student has chosen to share with the platform. The college can’t see individual records or have one:one coversations. The student controls their information and experience to create a curated list of colleges, discovered inside of the Scoir app.

  • Interview Students

    Learn how students discover colleges, and what is important to them in their discovery and selection process.

  • Explore

    Explore via workshops and how might we exercises, how to solve the problem of limited search and encourage more exploration

  • Design and Ideation

    Create designs to potentially encourage more exploration and an equitable channel for colleges and students to connect.

  • Test and Iterate

    Deliver high fidelity screens to test and learn from. Work together with Product Management and Engineering to define MVP.

Research and Interviews

What I learned upfront before designing

 

Current Student Platform Behavior

  • Those new to Scoir were unsure on where to start or what to do next, illustrating dead-ends in the experience

  • Current Scoir users admitted to repeating behaviors and not exploring or learning how to use Scoir to its potential 

  • Students are searching for additional information looking for unique qualities of colleges to help them compare and narrow

Platform Satisfaction and Competitors

39% of students reported that they would be very disappointed if they could no longer use Scoir

67% reported feeling confident/inspired/excited to use Scoir as a college search tool

Top 5 other tools used

  1. Search engines 

  2. Family

  3. Friends

  4. Video/News sharing platforms (Youtube, Reddit, etc.)

  5. College Fair

Design Requirements:

  • Require students to fill out basic preference information

  • Show students a feed of colleges based on preference

  • Allow colleges to anonymously send messages based on preference

  • Give students a controlled way to curate their feed and lists of colleges

College Dashboard

Provide analytics and insights to colleges based on messages and views of personalized content

Show overviews of number of times school was seen in a search, profile views, and dashboard views.

Give colleges prompts to create rich content that can then be automatically served in various parts of the experience. Content is tagged with preference matching tags.

Features and Solutions

An explore experience, and a college messaging tool to match

 

Themes

Collect data and preferences on students to personalize a feed

Create a low-touch onboarding and jumping off point for students to interact with

Allow colleges to key off of student preferences to send messages

Give controls to students to control flows of messages and content

Expectation and Willingness


Students want to and are willing to share their information with Scoir. 

They view Scoir as trustworthy and reliable resource that won’t use their information in a malicious way.

Interest and Personalization

Students want to hear from colleges they’re interested in. 

They want messages to feel personalized, not generic. They want to hear more about programs they’re interested in, COVID-19 updates, extracurriculars, events, etc. 

Next Steps and Learnings

Takeaways

Colleges require minimal to no effort to create content, their jobs are inundated with a ton of content platforms

Students do not want junk and recognize college junk mail and email lists are incredibly annoying

Building analytics was equally as important to building a new feature

Putting revenue driving features are the forefront was a mistake in strategy for UX, resulting in churn of ideas that were not sustainable for the business

Stakeholder alignment was easily attained when we could show as a team the user base has a need we fulfilled, with video and interview snippets.