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
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
Calendar: Feature that allows the student to visualize their entire high school process on a long term and short term level
Journal: Reflection tool that allows students to write about their high school experiences and narrow down their interests/passions/goals when applying to college
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
Dashboard: An overview of their profile that contains highlights of their tasks to come, useful resources and motivation
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
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!