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GrantMe offers a 24-hour essay review service for scholarship and university applications. To maximize their chances, students should go through 2-3 rounds of feedback before submitting their applications. During peak periods, such as major scholarship and university deadlines, the essay editing team handles up to 170 essays per day. To improve efficiency and enhance the experience for both students and our internal editing team, we are exploring ways to optimize the review process.
Darius, our primary persona, represents our students that need support with school admissions and scholarship applications. Their needs are a system that is clear, simple, personalized, and relevant. On top of that, they also need support with staying focused and motivated as it's an extremely stressful time for them.
During my UX audit, I found that our essay review process relies on three separate systems for students and editors. Students submit their essays by sharing a Google Doc link, which is then sent to editors via a Zapier integration with Trello. Editors review the essays in Google Docs, provide feedback, and move the submission to the "Done" column on Trello. Another Zapier integration then notifies students via text and provides access to their reviewed essay.
However, the audit revealed key interaction issues:
I interviewed 5 of our students in order to understand their pain points with the current essay submission and management system. Here are some of the issues that students have expressed:
"I have a hard time knowing which essays I have submitted because all I see is the Google Docs links."
"Sometimes the editor comments are not consistent and I end up receiving a lower score on my essay."
As I wasn't as familiar with the essay editing workflow, I also booked a meeting with our essay editor leads in order to understand their needs and frustrations with the current workflow.
"Students often forget to give access their Google Docs which leads to a delay in essay editing."
"Sometimes students would delete our scores and comments on the Google Docs which result in inconsistent scores."
Now that we've identified the key problems, we're focusing on designing a better experience using How Might We statements.
For students, How Might We:
For essay editors, How Might We:
Patrik and I hosted several rounds of whiteboarding sessions with our PM and Engineering manager. We decided to create the Google Docs for students and own the Docs so we can control the experience more. We had conversations with the engineering manager (Adam) in order to figure out the technical constraints. We landed on the solution to work with Zapier integration to send data between Trello and Drupal to manage essay submissions, display score and comments in the app.
After testing the prototype with 5 students, we went through several iterations in our design. As this is an important workflow to our students, we tested again on our multi-dev environment to make sure that we catch all the usability issues (or note them for future considerations) before our release.
On the submit writing feature, at first I added delight to the flow by adding a visual at the top. Then I realized that it was impacting the main content which is the essay submission function. So I decided to go for a split screen to see both information at the same time. Hint: we got another iteration to this feature post-launch.
On the writing management page, students were a bit confused to follow through the new system because they’re used to the old system. So I added more tooltips to explain what each field is about and explanation under each field to explain how to best fill them out.
Clickthrough prototype coming soon.
I am a Product Designer whose passion lies in enhancing the human experience through scalable digital solutions.
