EF High School Exchange Year l 2020-2021
My Exchange
Reimagining the student application process to answer to the needs and expectations of digital natives.
User research
Ideation,IA, early wireframes for all flows. Hi-fi wireframes for dashboard task/milestones and application flows.
User testing
My role
HSEY (High School Exchange year) offer high school student the chance go on an exchange year to the US, UK or Ireland. Discovery research helped to better understand the customers, their journey and the staff’s experience dealing with our customers. All was mapped out into a service blueprint.
The student journey is long, sometimes 2 years, and complex. The constant touchpoint is the student portal where students manage their application, travel, visa etc. The portal however, leaves much to wish for.
Background
Service map of the experience, it’s very detailed and does not work well as an image here but I’m happy to explain it further.
Key finding
Our customers are digital natives, they expect an easy mobile first experience - yet they are faced with a desktop only, scattered and confusing multi-platform experience.
This in turn, leads to more work or our staff that needs to act as customer service to legacy systems.
Following the research stage we ,moved in to a visionary stage 2. We reimagined the student portal and drew inspiration from online gaming, social networking and task management.
The current digital landscape and touchpoint were considered to ensure that a future implementation was possible.
Key flows and the entire student portal was designed and tested. Suggested changes for future iterations were made but not represented in the below solution.
The process
The solution
A mobile first, one-plaform experience.
Gathering all students touch-points into one platform, making it easier to start, continue and finish your application independently.
Task and milestones
To break a complex journey into manageable chunks we introduced tasks and milestones. This to clarify to students the tasks that needed to be done at a certain stage in their journey without the need for contact with staff.
To help students through their journey we introduced a dynamic dashboard surfacing content that empower students in a specific stage in their journey.
Dynamic dashboard
I learned
Working with non-native english speakers we need to really consider, test and simplify our language use (such as “milestones”).