Connecting prospective students with peers and seniors to get feedback and share more about themselves.
Getting accepted to one of the country's top-tier research universities requires applicants to present themselves in the best way possible and showcase selected details about their past experiences. This process can improve their chances of being accepted. The Hive is a platform that makes this process easier by connecting prospective students with their peers and senior students at the University of Rochester to get feedback and to share more about themselves.
In order to make sure the platform meets user expectations, we took several steps to improve the final UX. The first step was building user journeys reflective of a typical target user, then we interviewed a focus group of users to learn more about their needs and to perform prototype testing so we could validate the designs. This process helps us figure out what’s working and what isn’t, to iterate the design until it effectively meets users’ needs.
The Hive offers a great set of features and capabilities for prospective students to improve their profile, so we wanted to make sure they can take advantage of it right away. To achieve this we built an on-boarding experience that guides users through the different steps needed to set up their profile and makes adaptation to the user interface much smoother.
We designed the interface for a UR assistant who can help with all sort of questions from prospective students and have the ability to broadcast important announcements.
In order to encourage users to complete populating their profiles, we created a full set of custom avatars that can be gradually released as a fun incentive.
The Hive is mobile-driven to the core, embracing young students' habits of increasingly browsing on their phones and tablets. We created a responsive interface that scales perfectly and provides a custom-tailored experience for each device.
The University of Rochester wanted a sharing experience that is controlled so it's focused yet easy for students to use. We designed an easy interface for users to choose the topic they are interested in posting about and provided all the necessary fields to improve the sharing experience.