SEEKU
SeekU is a college counseling service geared towards helping students find their voice while navigating through the intimidating process of applying for college. They are developing a technology that guides students step-by-step through the college admissions process and gives them an on-demand access to college counselors that help students acquire the skills to do well in both the admissions process as well as life beyond high school. My task is to take all the qualities that make SeekU different and successful, and translate it into a digital medium.
Investigative Research
In order to get a better understanding of how SeekU works, we used multiple resources to collect data that would help shape our ideas for how we can improve the counseling platform. We used current "Mouseflow" analytics to see how people were navigating through the current site, as well as, interviewed SeekU counselors to get their take on what makes SeekU different and in what ways can SeekU be improved.
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Heuristics Evaluation
I conducted an extensive heuristics evaluation to test the usability of the online curriculum.Ā
Here as some of my findings:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-j-tKL0PKYOSkpIbmE2TXM0WVE
Iterations
Once we collected all this data we started with the dashboard, making several iterations on different ways to hold and interact with the curriculum.
Roadblocks
Once we decided on a design we liked the most, we started to build it out further and noticed that we missed something significant. The SeekU curriculum is very dense and has many nested elements. We did not see a layer of subjects that we needed to include so we had to come up with a new way to show these subjects. We came up with two ways of solving this problem. We then A/B tested the two versions to see which solution the users found less confusing.
Solution 1 (A/B tested winner):
Create smaller cards that drop down into sub categories.
Solution 2
Create smaller cards that drop down into sub categories.
User Testing
Testing....we did a lot of testing. We not only A/B tested the two versions of the curriculum layout but tested the "meet with your counselor" page along with the forum. It's easy for the user to feel overwhelmed and lost within the system so we tested the flow of these individual sections to make sure the user flowed smoothly and with clarity.Ā We made several changes based on the feedback we received.
Linking It All Together
One of the problems we found on the original site was the design consistency from the landing page to the rest of the site. I redesigned the landing page to match the dashboard so everything feels as one entity.
KPI/Signing Up
A key performance indicator for SeekU are the amount of students that sign up for a free consultation . I made it a priority to make that process as seamless as possible