Overview
TruLeague is a platform that facilitates authentic peer-to-peer engagement, connecting prospective students with a diverse range of university ambassadors—including parents, alumni, current students, and staff—to support higher education recruitment and enrollment. It features a community section for group conversations, a mobile app for on-the-go access, and a comprehensive analytics dashboard for university admins to track interactions and gain insights into student engagement.
Role
Chief UX Designer
Timeline
Ongoing (Since 2023)
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Google Meet, Loom, Jira, Google Docs
Challenge
As the Chief UX Designer, I was tasked with designing a brand-new product from the ground up, which presented several challenges:
Unified Experience for Diverse Users:
Create a cohesive user experience for two distinct groups — prospective students and ambassadors (parents, alumni, current students, university staff) — despite their differing needs and expectations.
Intuitive and Engaging Interface:
Ensure the platform is intuitive and engaging, addressing initial feedback that highlighted a cluttered and hard-to-navigate interface, especially for connecting with ambassadors or joining group conversations.
Addressing Key Pain Points:
Prospective students struggled to find relevant ambassadors, ambassadors faced scheduling challenges, university admins needed actionable insights through an analytics dashboard, and users demanded a community section for group interactions, backed by a mobile app for accessibility.
Internally, stakeholders were cooperative, providing clear feedback and support, which helped streamline the design process despite the complexity of the project.
Goal
My goal was to design an intuitive, engaging, and visually appealing platform that fosters seamless interactions between prospective students and diverse ambassadors, supports community building through group conversations, provides university admins with a powerful analytics dashboard for actionable insights, and ensures accessibility via a mobile app.
Design
User Research
I conducted research by analyzing existing data, stakeholder feedback, and industry insights to understand the needs of prospective students, ambassadors (including parents, alumni, current students, and university staff), and university admins. Given the tight timeline and the platform’s early stage, I relied on secondary research methods to efficiently gather insights. This included a competitive analysis of similar platforms to identify best practices in peer-to-peer engagement, community features, and admin analytics. The research highlighted key user pain points:
These findings informed the design of simplified navigation, a robust community section, mobile app accessibility, and an admin analytics dashboard for actionable engagement trends.
Key Interface Designs
I designed several key screens to address the identified pain points and enhance the user experience for prospective students, ambassadors, and university admins. Below are the primary interfaces developed:
Prospect Home (Ambassador List)
This screen allows prospective students to easily browse and connect with ambassadors.
Simplified Filtering:
Added intuitive filters (e.g., by major, location, or role) to help students find relevant ambassadors quickly.
Profile Highlights:
Showcased ambassador profiles with key details like background and availability to encourage meaningful connections.
Addressing Pain Point:
By introducing clear and effective filtering options, this design resolves the difficulty prospective students faced in connecting with ambassadors who share their academic interests or backgrounds.
Scheduler
The scheduler enables ambassadors to manage their availability efficiently.
Calendar Integration:
Designed a seamless calendar view to avoid scheduling conflicts.
Clear Time Slots:
Highlighted available time slots for prospective students to book interactions effortlessly.
Addressing Pain Point:
The streamlined scheduling tools with calendar integration and clear time slots eliminate the frustration ambassadors experienced with inefficient scheduling, reducing missed engagement opportunities.
Community
The community section fosters group conversations among all users.
Group Creation:
Allowed users to create or join groups based on shared interests or academic programs.
Engagement Features:
Included chat and discussion threads to promote active participation and community building.
Addressing Pain Point:
By enabling easy group creation and engagement features, this section overcomes the limitation of group interactions, fostering broader community building across the platform.
Analytics Dashboard
The admin analytics dashboard provides university admins with actionable insights.
Visual Data Representation:
Used charts and graphs to display engagement metrics, such as interaction frequency and group activity.
Actionable Insights:
Enabled admins to track trends and refine recruitment strategies with clear, data-driven insights.
Addressing Pain Point:
The robust analytics dashboard directly addresses the lack of detailed analytics, empowering admins to track engagement trends and measure recruitment impact effectively.
Collaboration
Working remotely from India, I collaborated with a distributed team: the tech team in my hometown, the marketing and main team in the US, and additional team members in Canada and Sweden. We used Google Meet as the medium to connect for regular video calls, Loom for communicating design updates and feedback asynchronously, Jira for task management to track progress and assign responsibilities, and Google Docs for documenting ideas and meeting notes, ensuring alignment across time zones.
Validation
Iterative Design Process
I am currently working on the fourth version of the platform, continuously improving the product by incorporating user feedback and iterating on the design to enhance usability and engagement. This iterative approach ensures the platform evolves to meet the diverse needs of prospective students, ambassadors, and university admins.
Usability Testing
I conducted usability testing with prospective students and used AI to evaluate features like initiating chats, joining group conversations, scheduling interactions, and accessing the admin analytics dashboard, while testing the mobile app for accessibility and ease of use. Based on feedback, I refined the chat interface for easier conversations, enhanced the community section for better engagement, improved the scheduler for ambassadors, optimized the analytics dashboard with clearer data visualizations for admins, and streamlined the mobile app for seamless navigation without analytics.
Outcomes and Reflections
Additional Contributions
Beyond the core platform design, I supported the project’s success by contributing to various aspects, ensuring a cohesive user experience and aligning design with marketing and communication strategies to foster platform growth.
Email Designs:
Designed user-friendly email templates to enhance communication, such as invitations for prospective students to join community groups, featuring group images, descriptions, and member counts to encourage engagement.
Marketing Presentations:
Created visually compelling marketing presentations for the US-based marketing team to pitch TruLeague to university clients, highlighting key features like the analytics dashboard and community section to demonstrate value and drive adoption.
Impact
The platform has been well-received, with the CEO and clients expressing high satisfaction with the UX and UI. Clients frequently commend the design to the US team and CEO, noting its intuitive nature and the seamless integration of features like the community section, mobile app, and admin analytics dashboard. The analytics dashboard, in particular, has empowered university admins to make data-driven decisions, leading to improved engagement and recruitment outcomes.
Lessons Learned
I learned that creating a successful digital product is a continuous process—it doesn’t end with the initial launch. Ongoing iteration and user feedback are crucial for sustained improvement.
This experience taught me to prioritize user-centric design from the outset, ensuring that each iteration addresses real user needs across diverse groups. This approach has influenced my future projects by reinforcing the importance of iterative design, cross-functional collaboration, and balancing the needs of multiple user types.
