Initial Insights
"I want to study abroad but need a high budget. It takes me a lot of time to search for financial aid online."
"I want to build a profile to differentiate myself from many other candidates, but I need to figure out where to start. It costs me a lot of time to find somebody to help."
"I want to make a living for my study abroad by helping students who want to build a profile to get a scholarship, but I have no idea how to do that."
From all those observations above, the idea of making a product which can help them came up. With that in mind, the founder named our product OSLA, the abbreviation for "opportunities for studying and living abroad".
Project Overview
Category: Web app
Scope of work: UI - UX design, Usability testing, Art direction
Company: OSLA
Discover Phase
During this phase, after talking with a group of 6, 18 to 30 years old, including undergraduate students in Vietnam and working as professional workers, we found that most of them struggle with finding a scholarship and validating their profile to match it.
For the same age group but with those pursuing their full-time degree overseas, most of them say if there is a place where they can subscribe to be an adviser, that will help them a lot in making a living without spending a lot of time, as well as strengthen their academic skills.
Goal and Hypothesis Statement
This product aims to match prospective students with suitable programs/scholarships and mentors worldwide, as well as management and communication tools.
We believe that will allow students to narrow down suitable programs/scholarships, connect with mentors for advice, and build their profiles.
Problem and Challenges
Many students seeking opportunities abroad want to build an excellent profile to earn a scholarship and reduce the tuition fee, but they need to figure out where to start.
Even though the internet has everything, they still need somebody to help check their documents, advise suitable financial aid plans, as well a place organise their copies.
Also, subscribing to advisory centres costs them a lot of money. On the other hand, people pursuing their studies abroad need to make a living. Instead of doing manual work or finding it hard to get an academic job at school, they can earn it by providing advisory services at an affordable fee for prospective students. Therefore, they need room to connect with people who need help.
Scholarships and programs matching tool
OSLA.io
Definition - Ideation
During phase 1, we focus on how the matching tool and scholarships/programs management work best.
Based on the discussion between the founder, and the engineering squad, my role is to re-organise the information architecture, develop the components library and design the MVP version.
In the next step in phase 2, we planned to work on file editor, management and communication function.
Brainstorm notes for login - sign up as a mentor/mentee, dashboard and matched result list (phase 1)
Editor function flow (for phase 2)
IA of the Matching function (phase 1)
Testing
In this stage, I tried to validate the information in the matching tool and how the result is shown on the page.
I thought it didn't need a lot of fields to match the scholarship, as well as show the list without labels and categorise them.
However, after finishing the testing for the first version, users questioned me about how to find the more type of programs they wanted and if we could match the proper result without specific information.
And with the recommendation list, most said that they feel it needs to have a better visual hierarchy.
After testing, I worked again on the IA of the matching function and categorised the result into 3 types of programs.
Besides that, I keep developing the design for phase 2, the file editor, management and communication space for mentees and mentors, after handing the design over to developers with comments and annotations for the MVP version.
IA of the Matching function
Final design
Reflection
After launching the MVP version, we had around 200 users create their profiles and started to add programs they matched to their list.
With that result, the founder demonstrated it to the investors along with the design for phase 2. Although they challenged us in our concept in the next stage, I know it will be a long road but a promising prospect for the final product.
This was one of my challenging and exciting design projects because it was a great experience to practice my skills not only with UI but also to have a chance to practice my research and testing skills.
If I have a chance to make the design better, I would ask the users more about their thoughts and feelings about what kind of information fields they think could be used to match their needs, as well as show the dashboard concept about it earlier in the discovery phase.