I was part of a team of five working on a project that aimed to address the challenges faced by an educational institution in managing the admissions process. The institution was frustrated with the complicated and bureaucratic processes that could result in a loss of potential students. Our objective was to design and develop a web application that simplifies the admissions process, reduces the likelihood of losing potential students, and provides a seamless experience for both the institution and prospective students. My role in the project involved conducting research, interviewing users, facilitating ideation sessions, and designing and prototyping the platform. I also helped to define the relevant design principles and improve the user flow to ensure that the platform was user-friendly, efficient, and addressed the pain points of its target use
Project Scoping and User Interviews During the project's initial stages, I facilitated a collaborative team meeting to establish project parameters and milestones, utilizing a versatile Miro board for efficient planning. In parallel, through user interviews, I identified pain points for educational institutions and agents, including data inaccuracies and language barriers. Additionally, pain points within the AtOnce platform were recognized, emphasizing the need for a user-friendly interface and streamlined processes. These insights are driving the development of AtOnce.biz to provide a seamless service, prioritizing accuracy, efficiency, and user satisfaction.
During user interviews, the main pain points of the AtOnce platform for schools and agents were identified as incorrect and incomplete data, language barriers, different time zones, manual entry, and prioritization of workflow. From a system standpoint, the existing AtOnce platform had significant usability problems, which I identified through a heuristic evaluation. The platform was text-heavy, required excessive saving, had a clunky form builder, and inconsistency of naming conventions. These problems indicate that the AtOnce platform is not providing a desirable user experience and highlights the importance of having a user-friendly and intuitive platform that minimizes errors, re-work, and delays while maximizing productivity.
Key design principles derived from the research include the importance of everyone being up to date, time sensitivity, addressing pain points, reducing human error, commercial appeal, efficiency, and orientation and feedback for users. These principles highlight the need for a platform that efficiently manages large quantities of data while minimising pain points, reducing errors, and providing clear feedback to users, particularly in an international context where language barriers can be an obstacle.
The AtOnce platform's current onboarding user flow was deemed lengthy and confusing for users, so a new, more guided flow was proposed. This new flow emphasises understandability through conversational language and clear orientation and feedback principles. The aim is to simplify the profile building and organisation details entry process for users. Once the first onboarding session is complete, subsequent logins will also follow a simplified approach, highlighting key tasks and updates on the dashboard to prevent users from feeling overwhelmed. Additionally, an improved information architecture was developed to address users' difficulties in navigating the platform, aligning with their understanding better.
Accusantium quo eum aperiam ut nihil id. Sit nostrum et non beatae architecto tempora illum est porro. Eligendi venia