Where applicants get stuck, from the survey to the wireframes.

A US university's Costa Rica campus offers a US degree, earned in Costa Rica, for a fraction of the price, but its audience didn't know it. Through the agency Red Stamp Media, I ran the discovery for the redesign: a stakeholder session, a student survey, personas, user flows written as user stories, an experience map, a benchmark and a new information architecture, through to wireframes and handoff.

Problem: The curriculum sat three or four levels deep, costs were hidden or varied by degree, and applying felt like a maze.
My role: UX designer through Red Stamp Media: research, requirements, information architecture and wireframes. A separate UI designer completed the interface.
What I did: Turned a survey and stakeholder input into requirements for each stage of the applicant journey, benchmarked four institutions and flattened the site's structure.
Outcome: Requirements by journey stage, a flatter information architecture and annotated wireframes, handed to the UI designer.

Grayscale wireframes of the redesigned university site laid out at an angle: a home page with a hero and student life, How to Apply pages and an undergraduate degrees grid — Wireframes for the redesigned site.

What the survey said

I started with a stakeholder session, then surveyed prospective and recently enrolled students. Of the respondents, 54% were applying, 26% were in their first search and 20% were already enrolled. Degrees and curriculum, and cost, were the factors they chose most when picking a university. When I asked how easy each kind of information had been to find, the answers ranked like this, as percentages of those asked about each topic and rounded to whole numbers:

Information	Easy	Neutral	Somewhat hard
Facilities	62%	15%	23%
Each degree	58%	15%	27%
Contact information	50%	12%	39%
Total cost of the degree	35%	31%	35%
Job opportunities after graduating	31%	35%	35%
Scholarships	27%	39%	35%

The campus mattered too: 89% of those asked said knowing about the campus and its surroundings was important to their choice, and 78% said the same of the facilities. From the survey I built two personas, a 17-year-old aspiring STEM student and a parent who wants a prestigious school and an investment that pays off.

Where applicants get stuck

Experience map: an emotion curve across four stages with applicants' thoughts in speech bubbles and pain points such as the curriculum in the last level, secret or variable cost information by degree, hidden scholarship information and unclear phone numbers — The experience map, across initial search, career choice, finance and application.

I wrote the user flows as a table, each row a user story: what the person wants, why, what they need to know and what gets in the way. Grouped by the four journey stages (initial search, career choice, finance and application), they became the requirements: calculate annual, semester and monthly costs; find scholarships that fit my profile; see where I am in the admission process. The experience map showed excitement at the start turning into anxiety as the journey went on, with one recommendation per stage.

A flatter site

I benchmarked four institutions the university picked: MIT, Hyper Island, ArtCenter and New Digital School, on 13 attributes. ArtCenter rated well on all 13 and became the model. MIT's direct language, "how to pay" instead of "payment", shaped the labels.

The university's guidelines required keeping its current menu items, so I skipped card sorting and took the architecture through stakeholder reviews instead, from an alpha to a beta, with one goal: fewer steps, fewer levels and the essential information at the first level. In the new structure, Admissions splits by applicant type, and tuition and scholarships sit inside it.

Site map tree from Home to Admissions, Academics, Student Life, Continuing Education and About Us, with admissions split into transfer and first-time students and finances holding tuition and scholarships — The flattened architecture.

Grayscale wireframes of the home page and a degree page, with a hero, How to Apply and Our Degrees buttons, student life, short-term programs, a degree description, career paths, testimonials and a contact form — Home and degree page wireframes, handed to the UI designer with annotations.

I wireframed the main scenarios (home, the degree catalog, a degree page with a semester-by-semester curriculum, the menu and a three-step admission process) and handed the annotated wireframes to the UI designer.

Results

27%

of those asked found scholarship information easy to find, the lowest of six topics

Job prospects (31%) and total cost (35%) were the next hardest

journey stages, each with its own requirements

Written as user stories, from the survey and the user flows

Client details are omitted or blurred for confidentiality.