Optimising the University Shortlisting Experience for Yocket’s Counsellors
In this article, I showcase the design evolution of an internal tool feature built for Yocket’s counsellors to make informed shortlisting decisions.
About Me
As a product designer at Yocket — while I’ve had a chance to work on projects across the company’s different verticals, I am mainly tasked with handling design initiatives for Superocket — our internal management tool and the platform’s dedicated premium user experience.
About Yocket
The overseas education market has grown by leaps and bounds with the rise in the number of students choosing to study abroad each year.
To assist with the influx of students seeking study abroad guidance, Yocket was created. It is a community-driven, ed-tech company that helps students with their admissions to universities around the world.
The platform operates on a freemium model where aspirants can take advantage of numerous free tools and resources OR enrol in paid services to plan their overseas education.
Yocket Premium
Given that the overall study abroad process can take months of tedious research and documentation, for those looking for a structured, guided path to their overseas dreams, Yocket provides personalised counselling services to assist aspirants through this process.
Once enrolled in Yocket’s services, each stage of the study abroad process comes with a unique set of tasks and requirements for counsellors and aspirants alike.
With multiple aspirants assigned per counsellor, an effective way to manage assigned tasks became crucial.
Hence, our internal management tool, Superocket, was built to serve as a one-stop shop for all of these needs. It tracks all aspirant profile data, related tasks, documents and applications to help the team efficiently complete their day-to-day obligations
Contextualising the Problem
Shortlisting university programs is the first step of planning an overseas education. It involves finding the best programs for an aspirant based on their academic and personal goals, and preferences.
As a part of Yocket’s premium offerings, our counsellors are tasked with helping aspirant’s create their ideal shortlist in time for applications.
In the absence of a more efficient method of shortlisting, our counsellors faced the following issues:
- They needed to turn to outside resources for research and manually document their findings, which was very time consuming.
- They had no available tools to readily help them make decisions on what university programs were right for their aspirants.
- These factors impacted their ability to manage shortlisting for multiple aspirants at a time, leading to the need for additional counsellors to be hired, resulting in higher costs for the company.
The Goal
Given that our counsellors would need to finish this procedure in time for students to meet application deadlines, our core business OKRs included:
- Lowering the turnaround time required for university shortlisting completion.
- Providing the best university program recommendations to our aspirants.
Defining Similar Profiles
In an effort to create a seamless university shortlisting experience for our counsellors, the Similar Profiles feature was introduced on Superocket.
This feature enables counsellors to compare their assigned aspirant’s profile to similar past applicants and view the outcome of their applications. Profile similarities are determined by factors such as undergraduate score, backlogs, work experience, aptitude scores, and English scores.
Given that Superocket is a database of all aspirant and university program data, the introduction of this feature on the platform eliminates the need for manual documentation by our counsellors.
Introducing V1
Overview
When a counsellor selects a particular similar profile, they can view the profile’s details and view the university programs that this profile had applied to, been rejected from, been waitlisted for, or received an admit for.
The hierarchy in V1 is structured with the selected similar profile as the “parent element” and the university programs as the “child elements”.
Counsellors can further choose to filter similar profile results on the basis of specific profile parameters.
Issues with V1
- As a counsellor I want to find the right universities to shortlist for my aspirant immediately. However, with a long list of similar profiles, I have no way of knowing what profile to select to find my answer — Resulting in multiple, unnecessary clicks.
- Due to V1’s hierarchy, there can be a repetition of university programs across multiple similar profiles. Viewing these repeated programs is redundant for a counsellor’s shortlisting decisions.
- Upon selecting a similar profile and seeing their associated university programs, there is no information to guide me on whether this is the right university for me to shortlist.
- There was no way to view university program results for a specific country or course preference.
Introducing V2 — Admit Chances
1. “University Program — First” Approach
To address the above issues, one of the first design decisions I made was to invert the hierarchy between university programs and similar profiles in V2.
In this version, university programs act as the “parent element” and the past aspirant profiles associated with them, act as the “child elements”.
This change now allows counsellors to easily access university programs for shortlisting and eliminates the redundancy of repeated programs as seen in V1.
2. Admit Chance Percentage
Even with a “University Program — First” approach, counsellors may now be scanning through an infinite number of programs trying to find the correct fit for their aspirant. For this reason, we introduced admit chance percentages to our program cards.
To help counsellors make an informed choice, their aspirant’s chance of admission is calculated with a unique algorithm, and displayed as a percentage for each respective university program.
Given the emphasis on this data point for V2, the feature took on the name Admit Chances.
3. Filtering System
- In V2 of the design, we introduced country and course preference filters which allow counsellors to narrow down university program results by specific preferences.
- “Other” filters allows counsellors to view the likelihood of their aspirant being admitted in certain programs and similar profiles with similar combinations of profile parameters, based on the past admission trends.
Impact
- With the introduction of a shortlisting feature on Superocket, we have improved the efficiency with which counsellors can create an ideal shortlist for an aspirant thereby, increasing customer satisfaction.
- Aspirants satisfied by the timely nature of our services and the accuracy of their final shortlist may recommend our services to others, potentially increasing revenue for the business.
- This feature has made it possible for counsellors to efficiently handle a larger volume of aspirants, as it streamlines the shortlisting process and reduces the time spent on research and other manual tasks.
- While we have received a positive response from counsellors regarding this shortlisting experience, we are continually working on improvements based on their feedback.
My Learnings
- This project required me to explore and understand a variety of design patterns, including navigation, filters, hierarchy, and content structuring.
- I conducted usability testing with counsellors to gather feedback on prototypes of V2 which helped me assess their performance and identify more areas for improvement during the redesign.
- It is so critical to invest in the user experience of a company’s internal tools to improve employee productivity, collaboration and satisfaction which can have a direct impact on a customer’s experience.
That’s a Wrap!
Thank you for reading along and making it this far, I hope this was an informative read!
I’m thankful for the support of mentors and other designers on our team that provided me with constant feedback during this project. This experience instilled a lot of confidence in me as a designer, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn and improve.
Feel free to reach out to me for any questions about this case study on LinkedIn or Twitter.
You can also read more about the interesting work we do at Yocket on our Blog!
