The Strayer University Admissions Portal: A Case Study
Onboarding adult learners into their first online learning experience has never been easier.
The finished product, on desktop and in responsive modalities.
BRIEFING
It's no secret that trying to fit an education into the already busy life of a working adult is challenging at best, and at worst a nightmare for finding work/life balance. What is a secret, however, is how many working adults apply to enroll in online colleges and universities, but never make it to their first day of class. This is a lost opportunity for them to enrich their lives with education and advance in their careers. It's also a significant financial loss for the schools themselves, who spend an average of $4,500 to $6,000 in lead generation and marketing just to get a student from lead to applicant to enrollee.
With that in mind, I was asked by our CTO, as well as our CEO, to take the lead in a project to build the first of its kind Admissions Portal for Strayer University, to help overcome the challenges that students face in the admissions process, while helping to address the high cost of app-to-enroll drops.
CHALLENGES
For this project, there were four principal challenges:
1. Understanding and streamlining one of the most important parts of our business: onboarding.
2. Bringing together the right resources to address the first challenge.
3. Only 3.5 months to launch, from concept to release date.
4. Using all of this knowledge to transform a difficult process for working adults into a simple and transparent experience.
RESEARCH
The vast majority of projects that a user experience practitioner engages in typically don't require deep research into both the business practices of the organization that they're working for as well as their customers, but in the case of Strayer University, which has been in business for 125 years, the complexity of the business processes around admissions was just as much of a challenge as understanding the needs of our customers.
To conduct the internal research of the admissions process, I created a project leadership team with four key stakeholders from the most key parts of the business: the VP of Regional Operations for the DC area (to understand how things on the ground operate), the VP of Marketing Analytics (to understand how we attract leads to become applicants), one of our lead Brand & Message team members (to craft the perfect linguistics and visual experience), and a Sr. Director of IT (to help coordinate the various infrastructure & software needs this project would require).
With the help of these four contemporaries, I was able to quickly conduct internal analysis on the business processes surrounding the entire admissions flow, understanding the challenges that the Admissions Officers faced, and crafting the voice with which we would speak to our applicants to gain their trust and hold their hands through the process.
At the same time, I had funding and opportunities made available to meet with students who had recently completed our existing admissions process, and conduct user interviews and surveys to understand what they encountered in becoming a student at Strayer University. Through this research, three key challenges became clear:
1. With most of our students needing financial aid to take courses, the entire process around the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and moving from registered to enrolled was completely lacking in transparency.
2. The entire admissions process itself was incredibly inconsistent, depending on who their Admissions Officer was, and what time in the recruiting cycle they were brought into the fold.
3. A significant number of our student population came to Strayer because one of the benefits is that we provide a free laptop for new students. In this population, students didn't previously have access to a computer - instead, they had only a cellphone. That meant that the key to high adoption & success for any admissions portal came down to being mobile responsive.
DESIGN PROCESS
While parts of my design process vary from project to project, and despite the level of complexity presented by this particular challenge, I adhered closely to my preferred process of: Understanding -> Researching -> Designing -> Testing & Iterating -> Releasing the Product (and repeating). If anything, deciding to follow my standard process was actually the easiest part of the project, as the layers all fit nicely within.
My tried and true design process.
After reviewing the research that we had gathered internally and with students, it became clear that the Admissions Portal had to be transparent, informative, easy to follow, and as quick as possible to complete.
Over the next two weeks, I created several dozen sketches and low-to-medium fidelity wireframes of UI's in various states, and presented them every other day to the project and executive teams to gather internal feedback and, eventually, gained official sign off. As you can see from the images below, we went through a number of different design iterations during the first two weeks of the initial design process.
Early low-fidelity hand sketches of the Admissions Portal concepts.
As time went on and we went through iterative design phases, we finally came to a concordance on several ideas:
1. The Admissions Portal process should be limited to the bare essential steps to get a student to the "temporary registration" for their classes.
2. Knowing that many of our new undergraduate applicants did not own a computer, the entire Admissions Portal had to be designed for a mobile-first experience.
3. The Admissions Portal needed to be quick enough to complete at home or on a campus within 10 minutes.
4. Adding bite-sized video content to the most complex steps, such as the method of payment selection, was key to ensuring students completed the Admissions Portal and didn't end up getting stuck waiting for help if they applied in the off-hours.
Several medium-fidelity wireframes, created in Sketch, highlighting several design variations around navigation & process flow transparency.
Before gaining final sign off, I setup a live and informal on campus focus group session in the lobby of our Alexandria, VA campus to show what we had come up with to current (and incoming) Strayer Students. While we only spoke with 22 individuals, the feedback was fantastic, and led to an immediate change in the third step of our seven step process: class selection.
In the original iterations of the design, we had decided that in step 3, class selection, we could present students with the best two classes that fit their college experience level as well as their degree program. Using data from the last seven years, we have information on course pathing that has a significantly higher chance of successful continuation term-over-term versus letting students select classes themselves for their first few terms. The choices they were originally offered were to decide between online or on campus classes, and to either agree that these were great, or that they'd prefer to talk to an Admissions Officer before moving forward.
In the original designs, Step 3 was somewhat disingenuous when it came to actually "choosing" classes, and focus groups validated that.
As it turns out, students felt that this was a disingenuous step, as it didn't really involve "choosing" classes so much as choosing a preferred modality and simply accepting or not accepting what was presented. Instead, the students in the live focus group unanimously and without coercion suggested that we give them a choice of five classes, with the two best ones being labeled as "recommended", and that even if they ended up in the recommended courses (instead of their own selections), they felt that this would be a better experience.
After A/B testing this theory the next day on UserTesting.com, it was apparent that the feedback our students gave us was hugely valuable, and we immediately discussed the results of our focus group and UserTesting.com feedback with the major executive stakeholders, and decided to move forward with a new design for step 3 where students were given real choices for the classes they could take for their first term.
At this point, the Admissions Portal went into a final round of high-fidelity wireframing and interactive prototyping using Sketch, InVision, and Photoshop, and the development & internal QA testing process began.
RESULTS
Released in Summer of 2017, just in time for our Fall & Winter recruiting cycles to begin and right on time as promised, the initial results have been promising as of the time of this case study's initial draft in November of 2017. As part of the release, we have live A/B tested students who are provided access to the Admissions Portal versus students who were not, to determine the difference in A:E, the measurement of Applicant to Enrollment, wherein a user moves from simply applying to the university to actually becoming a full-time student.
The results have overwhelmingly shown that users who use the Admissions Portal have a 30% higher chance of starting their first day of classes versus users who weren't presented with the portal (but were onboarded in the traditional fashion over the phone/email/live on a campus). We've also sent out short surveys to students who did not complete the Admissions Portal (despite being presented access) but continued to become enrollees to determine why they didn't complete the portal.
As it turns out, the major differentiator was that the majority of students who did not complete the Portal despite being given access (but still enrolled) was that they worked directly with campus personnel who insisted on doing the work for those students - instead of the students doing itself. This exposed both a training concern internally, as well as a hole in some of our business practices.
Armed with that knowledge, we've continued to hold regular training sessions for campus personnel, and have seen an increase in Admissions Portal completions (and the resulting enrollments) as such.
MOVING FORWARD
As the Admissions Portal continues to bring new students into our virtual classrooms, the work for my team isn't over. The 2018 Roadmap for the Admissions Portal contains a number of feature enhancements and quality of life improvements that have come directly from the feedback of students who have used the Admissions Portal, as well as internal and campus staff. We continue to pour resources into focus groups (live and online), surveys, one-click Customer Engagement Score (CES) email & SMS surveys, and direct engagement on a weekly basis.
