Student Onboarding Experience

Web/Responsive // Application: Figma

Objective: Create a smooth journey for students, streamlining the process from courseware assignment by instructors to purchasing and onboarding onto Cengage’s platform and reducing support calls.

Final dashboard redesign with the consolidated tiles

Challenges: For the onboarding with the grid design, students were overpaying by 20%, refunds increased 20% with 48% of those refunds due to “purchased wrong product” and there was an increase in time it took for the user to figure out what they needed.

For the dashboard, students were having to parse through all the cards to find what they were looking for and it was hard to determine what was an ebook vs. courseware vs. additional materials (shown below). We wanted to come up with a way to solve for these two major pain points along with making the whole journey flow a little easier for the student.

Design Sprint and Lo-Fi Designs: After engaging with students and gathering feedback from support teams, the researcher, product manager, systems analyst, marketing team, and customer support representatives and I came together for a design sprint. This sprint helped us align on goals and brainstorm initial solutions to the problems we identified. We collaborated on sketches and discussed our ideas, which allowed me to create low-fidelity designs. These designs were then used for quick user testing to gauge student reactions and gather valuable feedback.

This shows some of the deliverables from the design sprint. We met for two days to work with the team to align on pain points and come up with some solutions that could solve the problems. These low fi designs were shown to students to get some initial thoughts and then iterated on further. Some of the ideas here we had to change because of technical constraints once we showed these to the development team.

Final Designs: I used this feedback to collaborate with the product manager and development team, refining the designs into high-fidelity versions that adhered to technical constraints. Additionally, I partnered with the researcher to conduct usability testing, ensuring that these designs effectively enhanced the student experience that were then passed off to developers for prioritization and refinement.

This shows the updated onboarding flow that takes you into the dashboard. The new dashboard is to the right and next to it is the old one. There were also updates to the brand during this project so the first screen has the old branding that will hopefully be updated eventually. Also part of the checkout flow is signing in and adding your information that was not part of this project.

Metrics considered: Since this work was just finished in December, we haven’t collected final metrics to measure success.

Next Steps: To measure success, we aim to see a reduction in support calls related to confusion and refund/upgrade issues. This would indicate that the changes have effectively addressed product confusion and improved the ability to easily find materials on the dashboard.