Attain for Students

iOS Mobile Application for Students

MY ROLE: Principal UXD – UID – UXID

My Goal: To create and develop intuitive, usable, and, engaging interactions with compelling visual designs for iOS Mobile application for non-majority college students.

My Task: UX Design, User Research, Analytical Review, UI Pattern Design library, Style Guides, XD Design, Presentations to stakeholders, Prototypes, Storyboards, Process Flows, User Flows

SITUATION

Being a non-traditional student makes it difficult to earn a degree. Whether they’re dealing with family responsibilities, a full-time job, financial need or a lack of a support system, these students need structure and guidance to earn their degree. That’s where Attain comes in. With a focus on time management, encouraging reminders and positive feedback, Attain aims to engage students in their own success by helping them form productive habits that lead to achieving their goals.
First-Time Full-Time Students fail – 40% of first-time full-time bachelors degree seeking students fail to graduate within six years.
High Risk students fail terribly – High risk students are 53% more likely to drop out.
High Risk students are a growing percentage of the population – Low and Middle Income recent High School graduates are enrolling in college at a greater rate. Enrollment rates older students is predicted to increase at a greater rate than for younger students.
Student success is a complex problem that demands a variety of actors bring their resources to bear.
With a focus on time, we can help address procrastination and time commitment issues by reminding them of the impact of their efforts, no matter how small, and allowing them to break up studying into smaller sessions.

Attain closes the college graduation gap by focusing on the challenges unique to students with underrepresented backgrounds

TASKS

Taking complete ownership of the user experience, design, feature enhancements and applying a User-Centered Design methodology across each lifecycle and mobile application release
Working with executive leadership team, and product manager to turn product requirements into design briefs, presentations with focus on student centered designs
Use design thinking methods to iterate through concepts that will be tested and validated with users
Leverage data and user feedback to drive and influence design decisions in future iterations
Create customer-centric designs by using data, market analysis, partner feedback, and a deep understanding of our community from all feedback channels
Developing design concepts, prototypes, sketches, user flows, wireframes, and detailed UX specifications to clearly define application structure to hand off to engineering team

ACTIONS

Participate in the planning and ideation process for yearly road map of new features and releases
Complete user research and building on current personas for understanding of practical usability
Develop a systemic approach for iOS application design system by creating a pattern library composed of symbols
Build prototypes for internal and client communications, and for usability testing
Create Customer Journey Map, identifying pain points, improvements, and feature enhancements
Make product recommendations to a executive team and stakeholders as well as defending those recommendations and explaining the strategy behind it
Conduct usability testing, and thoughtfully integrating feedback into application design
Work collaboratively with development team to deliver required functionality and make app releases live on schedule
Creating detailed data visualizations to help students understand their data, and share this data with colleges
Persona development and updates after user testing and analytics reviews quarterly

Persona’s, Diagrams, CJM, Analytics & Sketches

Examples of continuous iterations to improve Attain with new features and enhancements to the core features

Onboarding User Flow – First Time User

Dashboard User Flows

Study Timer User Flow

Calendar User Flows

Notifications Tab – Messages & Notifications

Term Flows

RESULTS & OUTCOME

Analytics was implemented for better understanding of how the application was being used. Added Appsee to review videos of users along with heat maps to fully understand where users where clicking and the user flow of different scenarios of a students cycle.

Customer Journey Map was created out of 4 workshops with various stakeholders. Outcomes identified and optimized moments of truth in the customer journey experience. Eliminated ineffective touch-points that often led to dead ends, shifted from a company to a student customer-focused perspective.

User Testing – Conducted 10 in person user tests using the think out loud technique while simultaneously recording the screen. Getting user feedback on the basic tasks included in the application. Further making the application beneficial to students to ensure the quality of our mobile app. Identified time it takes to accomplish each required task, removing extra steps and conjoining flows.
Created an in-app questionnaire that users responded to giving tremendous insight to feature upgrades and improvements.
Prior to releasing to public we had bug bashing systems in place to avoid bugs and deliver the best customer experience possible.
Conducted QA testing repeated regularly to help to procure a sense of stability for the app prior to new launches to app store.
Launched 11 updates and improvements to the app store to improve bugs, navigation, features and overall use of the application.
Covid-19 had an impact on colleges that was unforeseen, as a team we decided the mobile application should be dissolved until the future of All Star Directories could be seen.

As of January 2023 the application is still available for download for iPhones in the Apple App Store named Attain for Students