Creating a Better Scholarship Experience for Students

Plexuss 2021 - 2022

Checklist students were presented with before applying to scholarships.

My Role

Lead

UX / UI

Q/A

I designed every piece end to end for mobile web, desktop, iOS & Android. I worked cross functionally between the multiple departments of our small team (data science, marketing, development & sales) to bring our shared vision to life. The initial project took a few weeks to launch but we rolled out several phases after launch which spanned over 3 months.

Why did we build scholarships?

The current scholarship process is very tedious and often requires jumping from one site to another.

Problems we wanted to address

Making the scholarship process easier & consolidated for students

Provide an easy solution for our backend to review & select winners

Scholarships

In order for students to be eligible for scholarships, most sites require a good amount of information before they can apply. Plexuss gathers extensive data from students during signup, but there were a few more pieces we needed to qualify students.

We also needed a way to incentivize profile completion so we presented it as a checklist & tied it to scholarships and recruitment.

Discovering Scholarships

Once a student has filled out the necessary requirements they are then able to select and apply to as many scholarships as they see fit. We launched with about 5 categories and are now at over 15 different categories for scholarships. To give a sense of urgency we included a counter that counts down the days until the deadline.

Scholarship Winners

Since our scholarships were micro and reoccurring, we award students each month. Along with that was a campaign to announce the scholarship winners, which included a winner's page and a testimonial video.

Fun fact😊 : I actually coded the header/year so it could be easily updated instead of replacing a graphic so its entirely CSS. (I am by no means a developer, but I know some CSS)

Example Scholarship Winner Video

I created the template/thumbnail, video animation and entire process to be automated as it was a core requirement from our marketing department.

Scholarship Backend/CMS

Part of the requirements for this project was having a CMS so we can easily add & edit scholarship listings, review submissions, score & select winners. We have an existing CMS which I also designed and was integrated using the same format.

Outcomes

After showing students a checklist of what was needed to apply to scholarships, completion increased by 20% . To this day, Scholarships remains one of the most popular features on Plexuss.

The CMS also decreased the manual time needed to log & sort scholarships for our data science & marketing departments.

Challenges

One thing that was quite a big challenge was advocating for our students privacy. I had to champion and advocate for students at quite a few touchpoints during this.

One example: A stakeholder wanted scholarships to be automatically posted to the entire newsfeed upon submission. I tried to emphasize how we should give our students an option to include it as a post or an option to share it to our feed if they won, and not by default as this was not apparent to students.

My suggestion was ignored & we had students who deleted their account, specifically because of this mismatch of expectation.

Addressing the challenge of safeguarding student privacy proved to be a significant aspect of my role. I took on the responsibility of advocating for our students at various stages of the project.

For instance, when a stakeholder proposed automatically posting scholarships to the entire newsfeed upon submission, I advocated for providing students with the option to include it as a post or to share it on our feed if they won. I emphasized that making it automatic wasn't clear to students and could lead to unexpected outcomes. Despite my recommendation, it was overlooked, resulting in some students deleting their accounts due to this unmet expectation.

Walnut Creek, CA