May 2018 - JAN 2019
College Search Made Easy with Cappex Portal
Cappex is a web platform that has helped 10 million students navigate through college admissions. For a long time, Cappex has been serving prospective students with the information they need regarding colleges.However, some of the features are outdated to meet the students' needs. Let's why we started to redesign every feature we have to make them better. Our goal is simple: college admissions are complicated, we want to guide students through the journey and help explore the colleges to find the true fits.
We scheduled interviews and conducted surveys to drive the problem-solving process. Here are some key insights that shaped the final solutions.
From our user research, we discovered two types of search needs: exact search and exploratory search. When students do not have sufficient domain knowledge to conduct the exact search, the exploratory search is highly preferred. They want to quickly discover the colleges that match their preferences.However, our search experience did not provide the best experience when students were looking to explore colleges.
Once a user passes the college search, they will land on college profiles to learn more about each college. From previous user interviews, a major pain point of consuming the college information is locating the correct content and understand the meaning of the information.We conducted various types of research and concluded that students couldn't always find the info from the pages they expected.
As an information hub, we can provide students every piece of information about each college they are interested in. But the most efficient way is to explain how the information matters to each individual student.Instead of overloading information, we could personalize the experience so that every student can consume the information easily and learn quickly about colleges. We mapped out the customer journey and focused more on improving where the business participates at the moment.
At the beginning of the project, we felt we haven't identified the problems and potential opportunities well enough. Therefore, we decided to do exploratory user research first. Knowing we had only 6 months to deliver the project, we planned the research and design process as the following. The details of the research process are presented in the last section of this case study.
The word "fit" came up a lot during our conversations with students and parents, but their definition of "fit" are all different. Most of our customers could not communicate what colleges they are looking for exactly. They viewed the search experience is often a way to educate themselves.Then we reviewed our current search interface and we identified a few issues.
Most of the users come to our site to research colleges. Once they pass the college search, they will land on college profiles that provide information on each college.We have more than 300 data points on each college, and from the research, locating data points is one of the major pain points for users, along with several other issues:
Since the platform was first developed back in 2008, the framework it used was not mobile-friendly. However, even with the unfriendly mobile websites, over 60% of the traffic came from mobile devices.
To simplify the college research process, the new college search experience emphasized information re-design and personalization. Students can browse through college information that matters to them and quickly learn more about the colleges they are interested in.Also, the new 2.0 design focused on mobile-first experience so that students can access and learn about colleges no matter where they are.
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College search should be simple and fun. Ideally, students should feel excited and motivated when browsing and learning about colleges. From interviewing them, we realized that "the college experience" means a lot to students. Therefore, when we design the college search, we tried to bring a taste of the campus and college life to the students so that they don't get bored when doing the research.
