Post Secondary applications are already a high stress ordeal to begin with. Streamlining applications into one portal reduces the complication for both students and post secondary administrators. This site is used by more than 400,000 users to help navigate their post secondary education journey.
This project was done while working with the BC Ministry of Education. "Employment is projected to grow at an average of 1.2% per year and the province is expected to reach 3.1 million people employed by 2033." This project aims to help empower as many people as possible.
My role was to make an enjoyable user experience for students of all backgrounds regardless of technical literacy, background or financial means. I was also responsible for auditing process to ensure the site was up to date with W3 accessibility standards.
In addition to the client facing portal, it was my responsibility to design the administrative portal Management Console allowed post secondary administrators control over their application process. Their responsibilities which were previously labour on EducationPlanner BC’s part could be taken on by the institution itself. This also allowed each institution to have their own custom configuration.
University Admins were expressing frustration at the lack of control they had over their systems. Before this application was developed changes would have to be sent to the EducationPlanner BC support desk, then elevated to the communications team and then finally sent to the Technical and Development team.
This lengthy process meant any changes took several business days for the admins and took time out of the development cycle for the developers. And often their requests were not able to be supported with the previous system,
The new site allows university admins control over their site. It also empowered the communications department take on labour that was previously assigned to developers. These tasks such as changing the phone number of an institution or changing the intake dates were not technically challenging issues and therefore a poor use of devloper time.
Prospective students often find the amount of information required to apply to university overwhelming. Our primary goal was to allow users upwards mobility with easily accessible information.
Aggregating all of the applications into one central system also decreases confusion for users and allows us to standardize the application process.
We were also very focused on users who would be upskilling or transitioning careers instead of just fresh high school grads as many education systems do.
I ran a card sorting exercise with common features the students would be using in order to figure out how to group the information they would need together and discover if there was an information hierarchy.
I then started to standardize the design patterns and components so users can intuitively figure out what a page would do or behave based only on visual cues. This served as the basis for my styling guides, branding guides and components I would reuse in the future in order to minimize developmental work.
I created a set of low fidelity wireframes in order to show a proof of concept
I then moved on to make the interactive prototypes, with weekly check ins with my project manager and product owners in order to iterate on the design process.
I provided input on the language and colour cues given to us by the marketing department. I prefer to keep language and colour consistent in order to confuse the users as little as possible.
This project allows the communications department at EduationPlanner BC and University Administrators to create pages without needing the development departments intervention. The data also integrates in from the Management Console the administrative panel I designed, which allows university admins to control the data that is displayed to prospective students. It also allows them to customize their applications questions, fees, campuses available, programs offered and more.
