Getting Scholarship Moola
Standing up a unique scholarship dashboard idea from 0 to MVP
Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer - Client Project
Responsibilities: Concept Ideation, Competitive Research, User Interviews, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Interface Design
Deliverables: High-Fi Prototype, Final Design Report
Tools: Figma
Timeline: 3 weeks (October-November 2024)
Team of 4
After understanding students’ difficulties keeping track of their scholarship applications, my team and I created a high-fidelity prototype of a scholarship board with a tracking functionality.
Summary
Our team was connected with a high school counselor, Amaroney, who was passionate about building out Scholarship Moola, a scholarship board with two main business goals:
providing students with scholarship opportunities they can trust
creating a community for scholarship seekers
Specifically, he wanted our team to create a minimum viable product (MVP) that he could hand off to developers to begin developing soon after.
The Opportunity
Screener Survey
User Interview Script
Conducting Interviews to Understand the Scholarship Journey
In order to better understand the scholarship application process, my team and I conducted 13 user interviews. Users were filtered with a screener survey I designed to identify students who were pursuing a higher education post-high school.
“The hardest part was definitely keeping track of all the different deadlines for scholarships and college admissions. They didn’t always match up, which made it stressful.”
“Sometimes I’m just a little bit confused as to whether or not the scholarship applies to me. I know a lot of scholarships are targeted towards specific groups, and I just don’t know whether or not I fall within that group, so I just don’t apply.”
“Most of the scholarships I applied to were the easier ones because for the bigger scholarships, they require a lot more work and a lot more essays.”
Main Interview Findings
From the synthesis, four key insights emerged:
1
Effort was a major pain point. Students found it difficult to apply to a lot of scholarships because some required a lot of effort, including unique writing prompts, long questionnaires, etc.
2
Competitiveness of the scholarships prevented students from applying to scholarships. Students felt like they “had no chances of winning anyways,” leading them to not apply to some scholarships they were considering.
3
Students wanted an organizational system to track their applications and would often do it on their own manually.
4
Students lacked scholarship literacy as many were unaware that scholarships were available as an option for funding college and often didn’t apply because the process was confusing to them.
As a scholarship seeker with additional competing responsibilities, I need a better way to find and organize appropriate scholarships that match my desired level of application effort. However I don’t know the best way to go about the application process and be a competitive candidate.
Problem Statement
Synthesis with Two Personas
Based on our research findings, two archetypes emerged. In alignment with both findings and business goals, we created our primary persona. Examining the other cluster of data, the secondary persona emerged.
Primary Persona
Miranda Motivated
High school jazz band senior based in Los Angeles, CA
a driven student from a lower-middle class family who requires outside funding, such as scholarships, to attend college
involved with various extracurriculars so she wants to maximize the scholarship money she receives for the least amount of effort
is willing to put in the effort for bigger scholarships when absolutely necessary
Secondary Persona
Colin Coastings
High school senior athlete based in Boston, MA
a student who comes from a middle class family that is able and willing to cover his in-state college tuition
would like to receive some scholarships to alleviate the financial burden on his parents
wants to increase his odds of receiving scholarships but just wants to apply to scholarships that require little to no work
We conducted a collaborative design session with the client, prioritizing features based on effort and necessity. As an organizational system was a the most mentioned, we decided to pivot from our original business objectives and design a scholarship tracking feature in the MVP.
We Couldn’t Do It All, So…
Creating Sketches to Ideate as a Team
With that, we began our sketches to visualize how we wanted our scholarship board to look. Our team went through two iterations of sketches, pulling features we liked from each other and clarifying how we wanted the tracker feature to look like in execution.
Using User Testing to Navigate Design Disagreements
While sketching out our designs for the application tracker, a team member and I had a disagreement. After another round of sketches, we still disagreed on whether or not to include the “To Apply” status, which I thought was unconventional. Ultimately, I suggested we include the status to see if users had any confusion during testing. Contrary to my belief, users didn’t have any issues with it and it was ultimately kept. I was glad we let testing make the final decision, rather than making an arbitrary guess.
We then went forward with designing our mid-fidelity prototype. After finishing our mid-fidelity prototype, there were specific features we wanted to test for:
Clarity of the auto-apply button’s functionality
Clarity of the application status options
After conducting 8 usability tests with students and post graduate individuals, some repeated feedback we received was:
The process of changing GPA was confusing.
Users expected a search bar in the saved scholarship section.
Iterating on Scholarship Moola Based on User Feedback
Presenting Findings to the Client
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Scholarships Students Can Trust
The client wanted to portray feelings of trust and approachability so we chose the color palette and typography accordingly, based on user feedback. With the results from the usability tests, my team and I then proceeded to build out the high-fidelity prototype.
Scholarship Moola Prototype
High-Fidelity Wireframes
“This is wonderful, thank you. It’s been amazing to see this from the beginning to where it is now. This is great and I’m excited to build this [MVP] out. I love it.”
User research can change the scope of your work.
While the initial business objectives mentioned by the founder were to (1) provide students with scholarship opportunities they could trust and (2) create a community for scholarship seekers, the feature we designed in the dashboard did not support these goals. Rather, we pivoted after the research showed us that many students struggled to keep track of their applications.
Learnings
Let user research and testing decide your difficult team decisions.
While sketching out our designs for the application tracker a team member and I had a disagreement about the tracker. Ultimately, we utilized user testing to make our decision. While the outcome wasn’t what I expected, I was glad we let the users decide, rather than making an arbitrary team decision.
Explore Checklist Functionality for Required Application Materials
I’d like to expand the tracker functionality and explore a checklist functionality for the required elements for the scholarship applications. Since the required materials are already listed out, I see this as a natural next step.
Next Steps
Build Out Community Features
I’d also want to build out the community features the founder wanted to implement. As we were only able to focus on one additional feature, we weren’t able to design a feature that helped applicants build a sense of community, a major goal the founder had.
Further Testing on the Color Palette
The hope is to also conduct further user testing with students in high school and college to test the usability of the color palette in the high-fidelity prototype.