Across America, high school students are not receiving adequate support and college planning from their schools, and as competition grows they need more than just good test scores and high GPAs to stand out on college applications. Taking this company’s original pen-and-paper product, my team and I were tasked with designing a digital product to help prepare and organize students applying to college. Our app aims to address the issues commonly faced by students applying to college, providing them with critical skills and resources to help them shine in their applications.
Through user interviews with students, parents, and college counselors, I determined the pain points and fears of parents and students like preparation, competition, standing out, essay writing, and keeping track of deadlines.
In researching other college planning businesses, I found that most provide only standardized, impersonal services, which can be prohibitively expensive and insufficient as comprehensive resources.
While many students may look to their high school guidance counselors for help planning for college, there is a severe shortage of counselors across America and private counseling is prohibitively expensive (some charge upwards of $10,000). As a result, students struggle to understand the exact process they face, the deadlines they’ll need to meet, and the criteria that admissions will look for.
Considering universal accessibility and effectiveness, we ideated an all-in-one, lesson-based college prep app with skill-building experiences, allowing students to learn about the application process at their own pace and providing them a space to plan their individual application process.
When thinking about our target audience, we knew we wanted to help support students in their discovery and preparation for the application season. This meant we would be designing for high schoolers who needed extra support.
For this project, I utilized existing colors from the pen-and-paper model, chose fonts, designed a logo, and created UI elements to make our design system.
For the first iterations of the app, I designed lesson screens to guide students through weekly lessons, an application calendar with built-in-reminders to help them organize and plan, and provided a space for brainstorming and essay practice.
We surveyed 31 potential users and showed them each our visual value proposition (VVP) to gauge the effectiveness of our branding and the desirability of our product. We found that the majority of users understood what the product was and believed it would be useful for themselves or someone they knew.
Afterwards, we demonstrated a walkthrough of our prototype mockups to gauge the experience’s desirability and usability. While most expressed desire to personally use our product, we were delighted to see that almost all rated the flow of the experience positively. In addition, many even suggested features they’d like to be added, like personalization, customizability, and integration with existing platforms like Google.
Other solutions in this field leave a lot to be desired. The CommonApp’s app added reminders and curated content for students, but it fails to go beyond the functionality of their desktop application space. Other solutions in this space generally offer limited resources or limited functionality, and a lot of the competition falls short of students’ needs.
Nonetheless, competitors in this field have raised funding, showing us that we are in a viable space and making me confident that our unique features would be desirable in this field. We are the only app that offers guided lessons, deadlines, and reminders all in one place, and this startup idea still holds the potential to disrupt the space.
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I'd love to help with your next project and I'm always available for a chat. If you have any questions or you'd like to get in touch, feel free to contact me.
