Product Management & Product Design at Overgrad
Document Sending Redesign
The Problem
As a college and career readiness platform, the ability to send document to colleges is considered table stakes. The original document sending workflow was built about 10 years ago and we got consistent feedback that it was clunky and unintuitive. As a result, many customers were opting out of using document sending in Overgrad and choosing to manage the critical task of sending admission documents to colleges and universities outside our platform, reducing the value we are delivering to customers and making it easier to move off of Overgrad to one of our competitors.
User Research & Discovery
I spoke to 5 key current customers first, 3 were using document sending, 2 were not and consistently got these points of feedback:
Sending documents take too many clicks and too much time
There is no insight for counselors about what admission document requests they should prioritize
Counselors can’t see the configuration of admission documents and status of those documents was for each application
Filtering document requests is clunky and incomplete
Common App is where most of our students apply through and without an integration, it doesn’t make sense to use Overgrad
We want students to have ownership over the process of requests, but it’s really hard for them to manage required docs for each college
As a district educator, I have to pull a report to gain any insight into what my counselors are doing and what is still outstanding
From here, I crafted user personas for our core audience.
Competitive Analysis
In addition to talking to current customers, I spoke to counselors using competitors and built user journeys. I got demos and constructed user journeys from Naviance and Schoolinks, our two biggest competitors. Schoolinks work flow is simple and liked by counselors, Naviance’s is confusing and counselors really dislike it.
Naviance
Schoolinks
User Stories
In collaboration with the CTO & dev team, I crafter user stories for students and educators.
Student
Educator
Wireframes & Mockups
With the user stories as anchors, I broke up the document sending projects into features. We decided we were going to use a table for application manager, so I also researched complex tables.
Then started mockups and worked in collaboration with the CTO updating designs for scope.
Through the process, we used icons, color and make filters increasingly more powerful and easier to use.
During the design process, and after years of trying, Common App agreed to an integration - exciting, but we had to integrate those requirements into our design.
Usability Testing
I conducted 5 formal usability tests and got recurrent feedback in the areas below.
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Counselors wanted to remove barriers for students and wanted required document to auto-populate so we added that into our design.
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To reduce the number of clicks, counselors wanted to send multiple documents for multiple applications in one click.
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Counselors want LORs to be automatically assigned rather than students manual assigning.
Outcome and Post-MVP feature updates
Since launching this update in Fall 2021, all but a handful of our district customers are using the document sending feature in Overgrad and we get consistent feedback that is it saving them time and providing valuable insight to counselors. Pulling reports from Overgrad is not longer necessary to get meaningful feedback about applications - it is all visible in app.
We have made a handful of improvements since launching
Adding settings so schools can determine how they want certain documents and applications to act
Allowing educators to export the data on the documents tab
Removing the “Review and Send” section. We did extensive user interviews to understand current workflows and needs of our customers - this section was built without that validation. This was built by me, for me, because I would have wanted it when I was a counselor… but none of our customers wanted it and it was confusing so we ripped it out.
The prototype link is taking forever to load so I added a demo video as well.