A feature designed to prevent revenue losses for businesses from no-shows.
UX/UI Design
JUN 2021 - DEC 2021
V.I.Global Partners
VIGP offers personalized counseling services to international students, aimed to help them thrive in the United States. By providing individualized support, VIGP enables students to explore their interests and academic aspirations, guiding them in developing a strategic plan for success.
VIGP provides personalized services for individuals, and each counselor usually works with multiple students simultaneously. However, as the business grew, the current approach used by the counselors became inefficient and time-consuming. To address this issue, there is a critical need for a system to streamline the process.
With the implemented system, our counselors were able to reduce working hours by 30%.
The manual tracking and organization of student files is proving to be labor-intensive for VIGP counselors. With each counselor spending up to 10 hours a day assisting 5 students, the lack of an efficient system for managing documents leads to frustration and difficulty in keeping track of important information, particularly during collaborative efforts like school applications.
Counselors have to rely on Excel files to track the progress of each student. This method is very time-consuming and overwhelming. Since each student has different services and plans, counselors need to create Excel files manually for each one.
To have a better understanding of what counselors and students think of the current method and what do they want to improve the most, we conducted interviews using Zoom.
"I can't seem to keep up with all the tasks for each student during application season"
"Sometimes, I accidentally skip important application steps"
"I hope there is a system that can display all the documents needed to be submitted clearly, including the deadline and progress"
"I want to know the overall due day is because that kind of tells me how fast I need to go through the process.
"I want to keep track of the deadlines more easily."
"I want a tool to help me prioritize tasks."
Top 3 pain points
Based on the feedback we've received, the current method used to work with our consulting service is disorganized, making it hard to keep track of important documents and information.
Face challenges in prioritizing and managing tasks consistently.
Important tasks are often overlooked requiring a rush to catch up.
Spending unnecessary time searching for specific documents.
We spent a lot of the time refining the information organization with different layouts that can display large amount of data without overwhelming the user. Taking the student’s service page as an example. The goal is to provide high-level information about the student, the progress, and relevant application materials.
❌ Overwhelming details all on one page.
❌ Lacks quick access to application materials.
✅ More space for essential student information.
✅ Structured as a directory for easy navigation.
Searchability is another key features that would help counselors navigate through large amount of tasks that belongs to various students. Here we have the Task Management page as an example. The goal is to help counselors to search and manage tasks more efficiently.
❌ Searching by keyword lacks context filtering.
❌ No high-level overview of tasks.
✅ More efficient task search with contextual filters.
✅ Improved visibility of task details for prioritization.
Structured Workspace
Counselors encountered a challenge that required monitoring the progress of each student and having a dedicated space to work on multiple tasks. To tackle this, we designed the feature to quickly find the list of the student.
Progress Tracking
Task Prioritization
This feature provides a comprehensive view of all tasks allowing counselors to monitor both student tasks and tasks created by themselves for their reminders with the filter to narrow down to view tasks assigned to specific individuals and filter by status.
We received numerous requests from our users, but it's challenging to address every aspect all at once. With limited time and resources, it required extensive discussions among the team and stakeholders to make decisions that best served both the team and our users. A key lesson I learned from this project is the importance of balancing user needs with trade-offs and doing the best we could with the resources available at the time.
