ENROLLMENT INTELLIGENCE

Project

'Enrollment Intelligence' allows higher education admissions professionals to manage the student enrollment process. It predicts a student's likelihood to enroll and enables an institution to accurately prioritize and target student communications. 

Uversity Inc. needed to learn how clients used the product during the previous year’s admissions cycle, and improve the user experience for the upcoming year.

My Role

• User Experience Lead

• Stakeholder interviews and workshop facilitation

• User Research (discussion guide, conducting interviews, user testing, sharing research company-wide)

• User Personas, User Stories, User Education

• User Flows, Wireframes, Interactive Prototype

• Analytics

• Collaborating with Engineering, Visual Design and Product Management to build and launch web-app in production

• Iterative sprints following launch to improve the experience based on usage and needs

PROCESS

1. Discovery 

i. Internal Discovery 

I facilitated team workshops, with time-boxed exercises to identify and prioritize customer pain points, based on customer feedback and employee experience.

ii. Customer Discovery

I used the priorities we identified to create a discussion guide for discovery interviews with users.

The calls were recorded and the findings were shared with the wider team. The generative interviews helped us learn about the internal processes within higher education institutions; staff’s biggest pain points and how they utilized different products to reach their goals. Next, we created a persona based on the team's knowledge of our clients. This was a very helpful exercise to understand how different types of schools used our product, and determine from a product-market-fit perspective who our best customer was. 

In addition, we partnered with a consultant working a similar area of education to learn about tried and tested methods of communicated predictive models. We also looked to analogous industries such as predictive sales and hiring services to find more common models.

2. Ideation and Design

i. User Education

One of the biggest challenges for us was the need to distill very complex concepts into something that was easy to understand and, most importantly, actionable. It was key to educate our clients about the new direction of the product, whilst maintaining trust and normal business operations.

We produced a quick video to explain the future product changes and shared it with clients on conference calls. The video was an important part of shifting the way our customers were thinking about the product. It was a low resource intensive tactic, which helped us understand what concepts our clients found hard to understand and how we could improve them.

ii. Designing a new product experience

With all the insights from our initial interviews with clients and feedback on the education/concept video - we were ready to start designing the product. 

User flows and Wireframes

I worked on the user flow and wireframe simultaneously, sharing different versions with the team internally and joining client calls ad hoc to share the screen designs. 

Interactive Prototype

Once we identified the best solution to move forward with, I worked on building out a low-fidelity, interactive prototype with InVision, that we could get our users to test. It was important that the prototype was kept low-res so we could get more honest feedback from our clients.

I shared the interactive prototype with clients via GoToMeeting, which allowed me to see where the clients were clicking and how they understood what they were seeing. This helped us refine further, identifying potential problem areas as well as validating product decision.

Building and launching

I worked closely our visual designer, engineers and PM to ensure the product was produced in the best way for our users. We did this via group working sessions, pairing and our weekly scrum planning and daily standup meetings. In combination with the launch of the product, we also designed a communication plan of weekly emails, blog posts and webinars to bring users back to the product on a regular basis. 

Continuous Iteration

After launch we continued to have an iterative approach to improve the product based on the most up to date client usage and feedback. We achieved this by proactively scheduling time to get customers on the phone and see how they were navigating the product and logging issues that came via client success. 

Results

• Positive impact on user engagement y-o-y (visits + actions taken)

• Improvement in user education levels

• Client satisfaction: retention/renewals

• # of successful client case studies.

Uversity was acquired by TargetX in July 2015, a company focused on creating the best retention and student success CRM http://www.targetx.com/uversity-and-targetx/. I'm very proud and grateful to have worked with such awesome people.