2019 – 2021
Design System – CRM – SaaS – B2B + B2C – Payments
Design System – CRM – SaaS – B2B + B2C – Payments
CollegeNET is a SaaS company building products to serve the admissions side of the college application process. Depending on the university, administrators often have over 20,000 applications to track, communicate with, and ultimately admit.
During the time I was at CollegeNET, I worked with a team of developers and product owners to overhaul the existing CRM tool. Used by thousands of undergraduate and graduate programs, each with their own unique use cases for how to move students through their admissions pipeline, we needed something customizable to accommodate their needs.
The Ask:
Redesign a communications tool for school administrators that can be adapted to their program's individual needs
School administrators needed a way to communicate with large swaths of students to let them know about events on campus that are relevant to their major or departments and feeds directly into their admissions workflow. Communications could cover everything from information about campus open houses (open registration, no capacity limit) to interviews (invitation only, limited capacity). In the past, busy administrators would have to use multiple systems and import data to individually attach to student files. Vital steps and information was often lost, affecting real outcomes for students applying to their next phase of life.
One of the goals of the project was to modernize the legacy codebase, modernizing the backend into Angular. We needed to move users to the new system, and minimize the learning curve burden on existing and busy users.
Discovery
We started by understanding the basic needs of a school's communication plan. What is the general path a student moves through? Who are the ones designing the templates? In my role before starting at CollegeNET I designed a lot of email templates and knew what elements to look for as we built one in-house.
Through user interviews we discovered a major need to be able to schedule interviews via the communications and CRM platform. Each school has a unique way they move applicants not only through their system as a whole, but through specific programs within schools. Each department works independently and often needs its entirely own instance of the CRM. We needed a way for administers to belong to multiple departments across a school, but clearly know at a glance which one they were currently active in.
Component Library
Since we used this project to move the code base over to Angular, we needed to build a new component library from scratch. We worked diligently to design components that could be reusable, purposeful, and met WCAG 2.0 AA standards. Working with developers, we detailed the functions of each new component in Confluence which was then directly linked to correlating JIRA tickets.
We developed a system to leave functionality notes on the prototypes for developers, so as they reviewed and worked from designs, they would have everything they needed. Before handoff, we also reviewed designs with the team to answer any questions and make sure all our use cases were covered.
Outcome
Through this process we gained valuable insight into our users patterns and behaviors and learned how our tools could best serve them. We got great feedback from users that we used to start developing a V2 and flesh out current features more.
One of my biggest takeaways from my time on this project was understanding that in enterprise software, often the user who will actually be using the system are rarely the ones choosing it for themselves. This is something I have held close as I progress through my career: make products that work for the people actually using them, whether they want to be or not.
