Objective
The primary purpose of this redesign is to introduce and incorporate the Empowerly Score and create a more intentional experience that addresses customer needs so that we can improve user engagement.
Background:
The company was launching the Empowerly Score, a score based on a college applicant's profile information, which then analyzes that data and provides an acceptance level summary at a specific US University (think of credit karma and its credit card recommendations). Essay Editing was the last key area that needed to be design and built to complete the Empowerly Score. The Essay Tool Page operated with a semi-functional input forms and ambiguous usability instructions. Initial research also indicated that users are unsure of the tool's functionality, which pointed to users being generally lost on the page and thus leave the page or site altogether.
Constraints
Need to abide by the new dashboard navigation (Essay tool will be in two locations : Services + Empowerly Score)
Engineering constraints, thus prioritizing the most pressing need.
2 Sprints to complete research, wireframes, usability, engineering handoff (spec)
User research
Partnered with the Product Manager and completed qualitative and quantitative research to evaluate the current product and any immediate pain points or bugs. We also aim to understand our student's ongoing process when writing essays and experiences when they receive their essay feedback.
For the full Empowerly Essay Tool Research Analysis, you can click here.
Discovery:
In context to the rest of the tools needed to be implemented to complete the Empowerly Score, Essay is one of the critical areas where there are 2 users involved - the students and the editors. Thus it was crucial to understanding the feedback process and the interaction between the students and editors to gauge how the Empowerly Score will affect this journey.
We discovered two critical things that we will address for this redesign.
The majority of the students and editors are unsatisfied and confused with the essay feedback page because there are features in the Essay Page that are not intuitive. Users either don't know about them or how to use them.
No cohesive or standardized process for editors providing feedback to students, thus creating ambiguity and guesswork on administering proper essay feedback.
These two insights pushed for how might we create a more capable and compelling essay tool for our user that leads to a valuable and enriching experience.
Solution
Insight through rounds of internal stakeholder interviews and testing revealed that the most actionable way to help would be adding microcopies to our essay tool. Microcopies can help remove the discovered friction points and act as a guide to educate critical information to our users. Having a ready-made answer to every question our user might have will help prevent users from giving up on their tasks. Lastly, we needed to improve all the usability issues that was uncovered from the user research and testing.
