ADORA EXPERIENCES

The future of college visits

Timeline

September 2020 to
June 2021

Team

1 Designer
1 Co-Founder
2 Engineers

Toolkit

Figma
Adobe Suite (Ai, Pr)

About the platform

Adora is a personalized campus visit platform that helps universities give more compelling campus tours. As universities struggle to redefine visits in response to COVID-19, Adora offers a safe and accessible way for prospective students to tour universities.

My role

As the Lead UX Designer for this project, I designed a completely new mobile experience for both iOS and Android platforms.

My impact

Designed, delivered, and tested the core app for the company within a short amount of time

By championing features that advocated for the needs of our users, my work expanded Adora’s product offerings and currently helps students across the globe to tour schools.

Established a reusable and scalable design system that could be used across multiple platforms, including web and Android

I created a scalable design system that included components, buttons, and color schemes that were reusable across Android and web platforms.

Current challenges with virtual tours

Based on 7 user interviews with students & parents, I identified the most popular challenges with virtual tours:

👺

Lack of authenticity

Visitors distrusted school tours because they were scripted to fit the general public.

🔓

Lack of student connection

Visitors were worried they cannot connect with current students with virtual tours.

Product preview

Trust school tours

Visitors can preview a university’s tour and will understand what to expect.

Give users control

Visitors can personalize how they want to view their screen.

Connect with students

Student-drawn illustrations connects a visitor to a student.

Creating a user persona

To follow a human centered design approach to my project, I created a user persona named Alexandra.

About

Senior in high school, new to the admissions process

Goals

Open to exploring schools, wants to stay close to home

Pain points

Doesn’t trust tours, wants to connect to student

Design question

Throughout my project, this design question helped me ideate solutions and also focus on right pain points.

How might we create an authentic, trustworthy, and personalized experience on Adora?

Identifying constraints

In order to identify business, engineering, and design constraints, I led a strategy discussion with key internal stakeholders. These are the overarching constraints that I identified:

🕧

Limited time

The designs and features I create should be shipped to the engineering in 2 months so that the app could be launched at the end of the year.

📊

Limited information

Schools cannot guarantee that they'll provide new information within 2 months so my designs should include current data that we have from universities.

Prioritizing features

I also wanted to prioritize the features that my participants mentioned during my user research sessions. The highlighted features were feasible within the constraints above.

1 Take notes on the app

2 Sort function

3 Favorite and bookmark

4 School suggestions

5 School comparisons

6 Internal quiz to recommend schools

7 Image gallery

8 Search feature

Design areas of opportunity

After creating multiple low, medium, & high fidelity wireframes and prototypes, I understood the designs and features that would serve as an MVP product.

Make Adora authentic

Let visitors play an active role in shaping the entire app.

Personalize Adora

Give visitors control on how they want to see the gallery of schools.

Connect visitors to a student

Student-drawn illustrations connects visitors and students.

Make Adora's tours trusted

Visitors can preview a school tour and understand what to expect.

Success metrics

In terms of how I would measure success within this project, I would do so by:

Measuring the time that is spent on the landing screen

A higher amount of time would indicate that visitors are exploring the schools Adora has to offer.

Measuring the number of clicks on the sort button

A high number of clicks would indicate that visitors are personalizing their gallery view.

Learnings

These are the learnings I’ve experienced while being a part of this project:

⚖️

Create scalable designs

Designs are fluid — my creations should reflect the possibility that more schools will be added onto the app. As I spent more time collaborating with the engineering team, I learned to take into account of various use cases.

🙂

Spark joy and delight

Of course, designs should be intuitive but they should also be engaging and immersive. My designs should evoke strong emotions where users are able to form an emotional relationship with the product and feel happy when using it.

Next steps

Conduct accessibility testing

I would conduct accessibility testing to ensure that I accommodate the needs of everyone. This is an area of design I'd love to expand upon and learn more about as a designer since the designs that I should create should empower everyone, not just the majority.