Avenir

Avenir’s mission of helping underprivileged high school students navigate their high school journey and the complex college application process was very close to my heart, and I was excited to be onboarded early in the development of this edtech startup to help determine the overall design direction of the company and the platform. As lead UX designer of a small founding user experience team, I played a key role in the company’s brand design and the end-to-end development of a multi-feature minimal viable product.

Overview

Challenge: Help high students without access to college counseling resources navigate high school and the college application process

Solution: All-inclusive website providing guiding structure through all four years of high school while preparing students to reflect on their most meaningful experiences and apply to college

Team size: 3 people

Role: Lead UX Designer

Key Features: Day-to-day checklist, Calendar, Journal, College List, Dashboard, Student Profile, Onboarding Flow

Future Anticipated Features: College Application Guides, Virtual One-on-One Counseling

STYLE GUIDE

Branding

With Avenir, I had the unique opportunity to take part in the branding process and determine the brand image of the company. Our CEO chose the teal as the primary color of the company, and we curated a cool tone color palette that complemented the teal while remaining professional, but also youthful and exciting. For the logo, our goal was to create something simple that represented the mission of Avenir, hence the college cap with the A inside. The branding of Avenir conveyed a modern design that was serious but not stuffy and allowed for easy readability. 

RESEARCH

Competitor Analysis

Although I was not primarily in charge of user research in my role, I did assist with user interviews and conducting competitor analysis for our product. For competitor analysis, we looked into other college application platforms such as Cappex and Naviance, as well as digital planners such as Asana and Notion. One important takeaway from looking at these other sites was that there were many sites that provided information about colleges, as well as many sites that helped with digital planning. However, Avenir occupied a unique niche of combining both the planning aspects and the college application tracking in the same platform. In addition, we drew some design inspiration from looking at other sites, such as:
 

  • Card designs, especially for selecting colleges to apply to

  • Ability to sort and organize colleges by application status, deadlines, and attainability

  • Breakdown of checklist tasks into subtasks with set deadlines and flexible categorizes

  • Filtered searches to see only specific tasks at a time

  • Progress bars to track goal achievements

User Interviews

Prior to ideating the beginning of the platform, we interviewed high school students to get a sense of how they incorporated long-term planning in their high school routine and what they would want out of a college management platform. We eventually compiled these high-level findings that we would constantly reference while designing. 

  • Users want reminders of long-term and short-term goals that they have because they don’t often remember them

    • Solution: Dashboard that centralizes upcoming tasks

  • Users want a space where they can prioritize short daily tasks by due date with checklist options - priority is more important than chronology because students want limited maintenance

    • Solution: Task-prioritization in the checklist

  • Users want space to plan out their daily tasks around bigger, weekly events that they have

    • Solution: Calendar with long-term and short-term views

  • Users want to know what the next steps are in the application process

    • Solution: College List with preset checklists and timeline view

  • Journaling about their day comes in handy when essay writing is required

    • Solution: Journal with prompts relevant to college essay writing

  • Users would like sources of motivation

    • Solution: Progress bars towards goals, reward system for when milestones are achieved, motivational quotes on the dashboard

  • Users would like a space to record all their academic achievements and extracurricular activities

    • Solution: Student profile for easy reference when applying for colleges

  • Physical Planners have their limitations

    • Solution: Calendar, Checklist, and College List that is digital, flexible, and compassionate

IDEATION

Problem Statement

The goal of the platform was to provide as much guidance and support for students as possible throughout high school and the college application process, while offering students independence and flexibility to use the platform in a way that best suited their needs. Every high school student is different, and we wanted each student to find a reason to use Avenir.

Feature Set

Knowing this key information about our user population, we set out to create a digital planning and college management platform that would encompass our user needs. We decided upon these features in the minimal viable product (MVP) for initial launch:

​Primary Features

  1. Checklist: Feature that allows students to write down and mark off tasks with little maintenance, and keep track of both short-term and long-term/recurring tasks

  2. Calendar: Feature that allows the student to visualize their entire high school process on a long term and short term level

  3. Journal: Reflection tool that allows students to write about their high school experiences and narrow down their interests/passions/goals when applying to college

  4. College List: A page with multiple views that allows the student to compile a list of the colleges they want to apply to, complete with deadlines and prefilled tasks

Supplementary Features

  1. Dashboard: An overview of their profile that contains highlights of their tasks to come, useful resources and motivation

  2. Profile: A page that summarizes their demographic information, test scores and other logistical information, and additionally a place for students to write out their goals and record information that could serve to be motivational

  3. Onboarding Flow: An introduction to the platform to fill out student’s details on academics, extracurriculars, and college interests

DESIGN

Low Fidelity Prototype

Checklist

Profile and Journal

Dashboard

Onboarding

Takeaways from Low Fidelity Testing

  • Checklist

    • It was not always intuitive to the user to click on the underlined task in the checklist

    • The sidebar pop out menu generally is more functional for users because it doesn’t obstruct the screen and they can compare tasks they’re editing to tasks already on their list

  • Journal

    • The journal button needs to look different  and users are confused and frustrated with navigation within the journal

    • The addition of a tagging system would be helpful

  • Dashboard

    • ​The possibility of editing on any feature on the dashboard is unclear to users

  • Onboarding 

    • Users would generally like more guidance or more information while they’re filling out the onboarding 

    • Users would like to fill in answers to specific information instead of writing in generic text boxes, which seems more daunting

    • Users would like the ability to search for and add colleges to their list

Calendar

College List

Takeaways from Mid Fidelity Testing

  • Checklist

    • Improve the readability of the weekly focus

    • "Today’s Tasks" is redundant

  • Calendar

    • "Daily View" is generally a little impractical because it is encompassed in the weekly view as well

  • Onboarding

    • "Academics" page should include options for test scores

    • "College List" page should incorporate “dream”, “target”, “safety” options

  • College List

    • The “view more” terminology is confusing

High Fidelity Prototype

Due to the product still being in development, not every high fidelity screen can be shown. I decided to highlight a few checklist and college list screens, two flows that I worked very closely with. 

  • Updated Today’s Tasks to be more functional

  • Weekly Focus where important tasks can be dragged and dropped

  • Division of tasks by category

  • Recurring tasks with progress bar for completion

  • Custom tags for dates and activities

  • Removed “View More” on individual cards

  • Status bar depicting application progress and upcoming deadlines

  • Cards with school details, attainability, status, and upcoming tasks

  • Same information as the card view but in a different format

  • Timeline with task deadlines and recommended periods of time to complete tasks

Conclusion

Working for Avenir was a very eye-opening experience for me. Never before had I taken this much initiative in a project before, and I learned so much about working on multiple aspects of a product from start to finish. I also learned how to explain my research and design process and work together with people of multiple disciplines all working towards a common goal. When I was interviewing potential users of my product, and making changes to my designs based on user feedback, and talking to my team about next steps and goals, I really felt like I was making an impact on education accessibility. Although Avenir is not quite ready to launch yet, I am proud to be a part of their initial journey. After a complete cycle of designing, I am excited to see my designs implemented, and I know Avenir will only continue to grow and succeed!