MA/MBA Admissions
Topic: seamless and informative UX experience for prospective MA/MBA students
Setting: in collaboration with Alison Reingold, Caroline Turnbull, and Durba Samanta
Opportunity
We were attempting to find a personal, relevant topic for our Foundations of Design Leadership course. In reflection, we remembered that when we were first meeting each other, everyone shared some anecdotes about their own application process, like how the program director had personally spent time with them in Baltimore or how they difficulty with certain steps along the way.
Eureka! We decided that we should study the very admissions process that had brought us here. It’s something we all shared and our thoughts could potentially be valuable enough to bring improvements for the future cohorts of MA/MBA’s.
Discovery
We knew we should not only interview current and past students about their experience with the MAMBA admissions, but should also speak with anyone in admissions positions, who had a hand in the process.
As we pushed together our admissions stakeholder post-its, we could see themes start to emerge and we were able to add codes and questions. We saw that they had positive feelings for the “High-Touch, High-Yield” model aspect of the process but they admitted it was a little “exhausting.” They were also concerned about how to integrate the two vastly different school systems. One interviewee said it was like trying to get two different railroad companies to merge and share tracks.
After admissions stakeholders, we worked all weekend to interview present and past students. When we reconvened and started pooling our student post-its, we could see a few themes emerging. Many users mentioned liking the personal attention that admissions had given.
We started creating artifacts that could clarify our data. We decided to plot all of our interviewees on the two-axis model that crossed opinions about the credibility of the program and how well the user felt the program was integrated between the two schools. We saw that there was a small cluster of students, who felt the program was credible but not quite revolutionary and who felt the current process was not well integrated. We decided that we would design for a student who lives there. Our persona, based on this cluster, was named her Melissa Toni Hernandez.
Now that we had a groundwork, we worked to define our goals the next day. We had written dilemmas that may exist in Melissa’s mind and asked ourselves, “how might we…demonstrate clear Return on Investment without having a lot of quantifiable data yet? How might we keep a personal touch without exhausting administrators? How might we successfully bring MICA and Hopkins together as partners in this process?
We decided that the guiding principle of our process was to “create a personal and seamless application experience that informs and inspires”
Ideation
Although the idea of a new website had been thrown around in our group, we pushed ourselves to come up with some wild ideas that could solve some of the concerns we had heard about. Some of them were making an exclusive contract with IDEO to hire our graduates, building a brand new building just for MAMBAs or having students compete in an Amazing Race style competition just to get into the program.
In order to help get our users into her mind, they should see her journey as the first part of our prototype. We made a short video with a puppets and props that followed Melissa from her first inkling of wanting to go to grad school to her final decision to join the program. From there, we decided to focus on creating a central gathering place for information that felt personal.
Although there are many ways to strengthen the whole application process, we decided a good website could act as a friendly companion and resource along anyone’s application process. We decided to create a paper version of a new website so users could click on tabs and opening up new pages.
Prototyping
Testers laughed at our video and agreed that it had reminded them of their journey. On the paper website mockups, they provided important feedback about content they felt was important to add and we talked extensively about how to architect the information so the site could appear very simple yet contain all the information they were interested in.
We built a simple wireframe of our website that would capture the spirit of what users had reported they like best and resolve some of the concerns they had mentioned. We focused on making the website seem integrated and sleek, yet highly personal and informative.
Insights
While further difficulties of implementation and the intricacies of each school’s bureaucracy were raised, we remained confident about the direction of this new website and its potential to lead the admissions process in a strong direction. After so much data, synthesis, and dreaming, we really enjoyed curating this new experience for future cohorts
Final Prototype
From our insights gained during testing, we developed a high-fidelity final prototype for the project’s conclusion. This document is available below.