Stellic Student Transfer Portal
Problem Statement
How can we help transfer or prospective students with their credit transferring and course equivalency planning?
Interface Design for Education Techology & Curriculum Planning
User interviews, competitive analysis, literature review, survey, task analysis, journey mapping, wireframing, heuristic evaluation, user testing, and prototyping
Year
2022
Role
Project Manager & UX Researcher
What is Stellic?
Stellic is a degree management system that allows students, advisors, and administrators to visualize, plan, and track accomplishments to ensure better graduation and retention rates. Currently, Stellic is used widely by universities across the United States and Canada. The tool requires each school to have their own, unique Stellic page.
Defining Our Initial Goals
After our initial conversation with Stellic, our team developed a set of goals that would direct our exploratory research:
Understand the needs of a wide range of transfer students living in the United States
Learn about the needs of university administrators responsible for supporting students navigating the transfer students
Gather details on platforms similar to Stellic to identify their pain points, wins, and opportunities for where Stellic could shine
Hypotheses & Assumptions
Our initial assumptions and hypotheses were based on anecdotal experiences and observations when speaking to transfer students and reading about the process. Some of these ended up being accurate, while others ended up being complete misconceptions. Some notable misconceptions we held that were proven somewhat false:
Transfer students think about credit transfers and degree trajectories before they actually get accepted and matriculate into new institutions. (In most cases, they don’t!)
Colleges and universities keep complete records of prior course transfer instances. (They don’t! We learned this is mostly done on a case by case basis)
Schools do not need a lot of information to know about a transfer course to validate and accept it. (Actually, they need a lot of context, including in many cases a syllabus and course materials)
What problem are we trying to solve? For who?
Learning Our Users’ Behaviors & Needs
Literature Review & Competitive Analysis
In order to understand the landscape, we explored other curriculum planning tools: Workday for Universities and Jarney (a degree planning website created by Tufts students for Tufts students to plan their curriculum).
Interviews
We conducted interviews over Zoom with students who have experienced these students themselves and administrators who support transfer students, including registrars, Stellic coordinators, and Admissions/Transfer counselors. Stellic helped connect us to several end-users who already subscribe to Stellic.
Survey
We conducted a survey through Qualtrics, which allowed us to broaden our data set and gather general opinions on Stellic and the transfer process.
User Task Analysis
To better understand how the process currently works, we asked students and administrators to walk us through their current process for analyzing what steps they take to prepare for the transfer process and understanding what credits were able to translate.
Who are the users?
Journey Mapping & User Persona Development
In order to document and visualize our findings and reach a shared understanding about our users, we developed a journey map and user personas, focusing on the experience of our primary users: students, as well as our secondary users: administrators.
Student Journey Mapping
We created a journey map to document and ensure we had a shared understanding of the experience of transfer students. If we were to do this again, I would have loved to make this journey map higher fidelity with more visual emphasis on the user’s feelings (for example: using icons or emoticons to flag pain points or specific wins).
Student & Administrator Personas
We created personas to understand and empathize with our primary users, students, and secondary users, administrators. These personas allow us to document and communicate our users’ needs to stakeholders and also compare the needs of different types of users.
Student Persona 1:
Wants to transfer to a different university after 1 year at a similar 4-year university
Student Persona 2:
Has completed an Associates Degree at a local community college, hoping to transfer to 4 year university
Administrator Persona:
Helps transfer students understand how they can stay on track and finish school on time at a 4-year university
How can we find a solution?
Wireframing & Iterating
Initial Wireframing
After uncovering the needs of our users and reaching consensus, we developed low-fidelity wireframes and set out on an initial round of usability tests.
User upload their transcript or enter their courses manually on the university’s admission website
User logs in or creates an account to go to the Stellic Website to save their information
User can compare and save transfer scenarios and programs at different universities on the Stellic Transfer Portal
Iteration
Once we had created our initial wireframes, we conducted a heuristic evaluation and few rounds of usability tests to find areas that we could improve our designs.
Heuristic Evaluation
We evaluated our initial low-fidelity wireframes by conducting 8 usability test sessions with students (4) and administrators (4), which were 30-minutes each. From here, we were able to find areas in need of iteration and places where user needs were not being met.
Usability Testing Round 1
We conducted a heuristic evaluation on our low-fidelity wireframe to identify low, medium, and high severity usability issues that violated Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. From here, we were able to iterate further before putting our designs in front of users, catching any low hanging fruit.
Usability Testing Round 2
We evaluated our high-fidelity interface designs by conducting 8 usability test sessions with students (6) and administrators (2), which were 20-minutes each. For these tests, we focused on the areas where we had done more iteration between the first round of user testing and prioritized student feedback as the primary users. We specifically talked to users about the flow of the product, since this had been an outstanding pain point in our previous user tests.
Final High-Fidelity Designs
To see more details, click the button to go to the prototype!
Tufts Admissions Website
(1) User visits university website and finds Stellic Transfer Calculator
(2) User can upload their transcript or manually enter their courses
(3) In this case, the user uploads their transcript and can see their courses listed
(4) The Stellic Calculator runs course equivalencies and prompts the user to create an account
Stellic Platform
(5) Once they come to Stellic, the user can play with different degree plans to compare different programs & course combinations
(6) The user’s home screen is personalized to show plans they have recently viewed as well as recommended programs
Concluding Thoughts
Overall, this design achieved our initial design goals and allows users to have control and transparency in understanding transfer equivalencies during the admissions process, which was affirmed by the positive feedback our designs received during user testing. Users said that our product was easy to use and made the transfer process easier to understand.
Looking Back: Room for Improvement
However, there were a few places where we could have improved the design and flow:
Users were surprised and hesitant to make an account so early. In future iterations, it would be nice to give users a way to test out their transfer scenarios without committing to an account but still giving them the option.
Currently, universities subscribe to Stellic’s services for their students, so finding a way to connect these different universities to offer services to transfer students before matriculation raises an interesting concern.
We also could have improved our process in a few ways if we had more time:
If we had started turning our findings into wireframes sooner, we would have had more time for iterating. Then, we could have compared more options in the design process and conducted A/B tests to determine the best options.
If we were able to continue this process, it would have been nice to spend more time researching the needs of administrators. While students are the users who are making the bigger decision of whether or not to transfer, administrators are still very active participants in this process, so more research into their needs would benefit Stellic, especially since they have more demographic variance than college students, who are largely younger and may have used Stellic previously.