College Scorecard
The U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard is a free online tool to help students, families, educators, counselors, and other college access professionals make data-informed decisions when choosing a college or university to attend.
01
Problem Statement
With nearly 6000 colleges to choose from, students and parents are often left feeling lost and overwhelmed in their search for the best fit. Incomplete financial information, inaccurate sources, and a wide range of admission requirements makes finding the right college or university stressful and time-consuming. Due to outdated information architecture the previous website failed to deliver the control that users needed to navigate complex data and lacked consistency across the UI.
To properly understand our users and their challenges we conducted several rounds of generative user interviews, moderated user testing, and outreach. These activities enabled us to define user journeys and gain insights on the preferences, and pain points experienced when using the platform.
Our research uncovered several issues within the platform. Outdated information architecture made navigation and filtering cumbersome and failed to deliver control for the users. Inconsistent UI decisions throughout created confusion leading to an increased cognitive load for users.
02
Solution
Moderated usability testing sessions uncovered multiple actionable insights. Terms such as Campus Demographics and Urbanicity caused confusion for multiple participants. In order to provide clarity and readability our team iterated with the client to rename the campus demographics section to incorporate a plain language option.
When viewing school search results, participants had difficulty locating the sort feature and several noted the need for a different sort order than currently offered on the site. We highlighted the filter via color and font weight to help emphasize it's location and active selection.
By creating a minimal design aesthetic, we were able to give users more control and reduce their overall cognitive load when accessing the data. To establish more consistency across the site, we developed a complete design system that allows our product team to maintain standards as the site grows as well as establishing consistency across the platform.
Through the use of generative user interviews, we gained valuable information that more robust resources were needed to help educators and advocates learn more about the functionality of the platform in order to better serve their students and families. We designed and tested new resource landing pages with improved content to ensure that they fit seamlessly within the site structure and delivered their intended impact.
03
Conclusion
We designed College Scorecard to bring together information on college costs, demographics, test scores, graduation rates, student loan debt, post-college earning, and more to enable students and families to make data-informed decisions. The new College Scorecard website pulls data into one user friendly platform and allows users to easily compare schools and fields of study so they can find the college or university that tailors to their needs. As the education landscape evolves and more data becomes available, our team will continue to monitor, test, analyze, and iterate on the platform to ensure that the needs of students, families, educators, and advocates are met when using College Scorecard.
