Transparency can ease anxiety when enrolling in a new experience

In this early stage of Year Up's digital transformation, the most meaningful change is occurring from within. By empowering our enrollment experts and listening to our students, we have embarked on a cultural shift in how decisions are made to improve the prospective student experience. We are committed to providing prospective students with a simple and personalized process to learn about Year Up, make the decision to change their career trajectory, and join Year Up.

Objective

Create a simplified enrollment process that standardizes expectations, builds trust in our organization's mission, and enables Year Up to enroll more students each year.

More than 12 million young people lack access to living wage careers. This Opportunity Divide affects young adults who are who are not in school, not working, or, sidelined into low-wage, low-growth, and low-stability jobs. Learn more about Year Up and the Opportunity Divide >>

Why

Results

Solution Evolution

A Simplified Student Experience

20-30

days

Original

hours

Outcomes

Average length of time between a prospective student inquiry and completing the Year Up application

We completed user interviews and discovery research to understand the problem space.

days

Original

30.7

days

Average length of time between applying to Year Up and learning of acceptance into the program! A 31% reduction in time!

Outcomes

Application questions per student

Student Access and Choice

Our new process allows students to have control over their application process:

Direct access to application form
Choice to attend info session
Real time status updates
Clear action steps

Returning applicant support

We no longer close the door on applicants that were not initially enrolled. Our new process better supports the unique needs of returning applicants

Streamlined Staff Experience

Tools staff used to complete their daily enrollment tasks

Tool and improved applicant management

42% decrease

in time spent on administrative tasks each week.

We changed the business process of enrollment, mainly eliminating a required info session.

The first design of a student portal which aimed to welcome students and explain next steps.

The staff experience tells the story of a student's enrollment with accurate data.

The final version of the student portal highlights a student's status.

Ah-Ha! Moment

A strong business partnership is the

key to collaboration

After completing discovery research, our team recognized that we would not be able to improve enrollment outcomes with a new digital tool alone.

We collaborated with enrollment directors to reimagine the enrollment process and create one standardized process for each Year Up site to follow, which eliminated pipeline bottlenecks and provide accurate data nation-wide.

WATCH THE TOOL IN ACTION

Testimonials

"I wasn’t expecting it [applying] to be as easy as it was. I thought it was going to be very complicated and didn’t have the best expectations, but once I was in it, I was very happy that everything was easy to find and it calmed down my anxiety."

Prospective student

Future State Journey

Our future state journey map, in addition to other discovery research deliverables, kept us grounded in the outcome we were trying to achieve.

Ideation

We started off exploring solutions for the staff experience with a design workshop. The entire agile team was involved in the ideation process.

Prioritizing

Of the ideas we came up with, we determined which ones were features that were important enough to build for the first release.

Wireframes

This is one example of a record page wireframe. Our goal was to tell a story about the student through data.

User Flow

We maintained a user flow of the entire end-to-end process. This was a great tool to align on what user actions triggered other necessary actions.

Portal or Dashboard?

At first, we were only going to create an application dashboard for the MVP (i.e. minimum viable product) release. We soon realized that a portal would meet more of our user needs.

Ideation

As we thought about building a portal, we sketched out what each page would enable the user to do.

Wireframe

Our lo-fi wireframes were used to get initial feedback and communicate ideas.

Real time status

The final portal tells students whet their status is and what actions to take at each step of the enrollment journey.

Behind-the-Scenes

Every great transformation comes with incredible highs, uncomfortable moments, failed hypotheses, and banding together as a cross-functional team to overcome challenges. Here are some of our most memorable moments that contributed to this solution