CollegeJourney.ai

With a solid vision of what they wanted College Advocate (original name) to be, one of my first tasks was to give them a structure that clearly guided a user from the overwhelming stress of first steps of the application, to full control and awareness that this journey is an exciting one.

The initial start of this project was definitely a tight one – there was three months to take this from ideas on a page, to a fully developed piece that we could share with the investors. So, collaborating with the CEO’s, I immediately got stuck into market research, the goals for the app and site mapping. While the core concept seemed simple enough, it is actually incredibly complex amount of in depth knowledge needed in a lot of areas of the process. A luxury that many families don’t have the time to brush up on.

With that in mind, the core UX needed simplicity as well as a swift insight into what users need, whilst also adding as much detail for them to explore around the applications, the individual colleges themselves, and how to keep them on task with timelines and useful data. Data-first design was opted for this product, supported by a robust system for both desktop and mobile, whilst still allowing the ‘charm’ of our brand to come through.

Our overall goal was to make this whole process feel like one you can tackle with confidence, ease, and overall make it an enjoyable experience. One where you would feel a sense of adventure during and accomplishment once that final goal had been reached. College Advocate really just wasn’t hitting the mark.

We knew we wanted to take our students and parents from knowing nothing about the college process to celebrating their acceptance letters together in an approachable and supportive way. Our ‘here to help’ mentality with our more playful vibes as a company made me think that if we’re looking to be there guides, then of course, we’re taking them on a journey.

A journey is discovering things about a place or yourself that you never knew. It’s about progress. A path you take through life, through challenges, ambition, even with its pitfalls. Every step you take is moving forward on your story. So to me, a journey is movement, but also meaning. Which is what shaped not only the new identity I gave to our mission, but what shaped our brand as well.

After countless metaphors, wild sketches that were trying just a bit too hard, and a lot of grad caps later, our logo was complete, representing our journey with families as a sign of hope.

One of College Journeys standout features is Alice, our powerful AI ‘counsellor’ that has vast datasets of not just college statistics, but social information too, and a learning modeling technique to help families connect with the process by becoming a more personalised assistant as she learns what is best for the students and parents.

The idea was to give Alice a ‘guidance counsellor’ feel, which meant she couldn’t just be a ChatGPT response that will churn out pages and pages of overwhelming information. We had to engineer her personality to have empathy, compassion and a way to respond with the correct manor. Myself and the chief engineer for Alice researched with not just our in-house mental health experts, but utilised the understanding we collected from personally meeting various guidance counsellors from schools across the US, to get an good knowledge of tonal voice, approaches to difficult questions with those subtle ‘human’ touches, and plenty more data sources to shape Alice into the amazing guide she is today.

We knew there was plenty of competition in this space, and a lot of great tools out there already to collate data on colleges, to help you with applying, finances, you name it. But one thing was always missing. 
The student perspective.

You can find the exact application requirements, test scores needed, the financial breakdowns of if you can afford it, but one thing I noticed is that no one could find if you would actually fit in at the college you were applying to. Again, with research, I checked up on students on how they used to find what makes that college ‘unique’ or if they would enjoy the campus, and most of it was scattered in bits and pieces over social media. But never in one place.

Using our established ‘voice’ and visual framework of Alice alongside the data pulls we could set up for each college, I concocted the ‘Vibe Check’ and our ‘College Personality Matcher’. Combined, these two products would take you through a few simple questions, match your personality AND capabilities to a range of great colleges specifically for you, then give you a full run down of the most common questions asked by students from the students themselves.

These two pieces are a massive hit on our platform – even with the current constraints of what we can pull – and when we get user feedback, it’s always clear to us that these tools really are a standout piece that get students and parents invested in our platform. It’s not all about the hard data and facts for your college choice. This is a place where you’re going to grow emotionally and mentally, so these students need this vital information to make their choice.

We look forward to adding further features to this, like community forums for students to interact with one and other & ‘react’ in real time, giving the real big picture to the new kids searching for their top pick college.

Great design doesn’t happen in isolation. To unlock success in our small but extremely capable team, I created a processes and templates across Notion & Figma that helped the connect between development and design communicate and collaborate more effectively. Importantly, I worked hard to prioritise a work flow that allows our devs to have a clear understanding of what’s approved and ready to run with minimal interference.

The defining feeling of my time at College Journey has been developing straightforward solutions for deeply complex problems, without letting things get tedious or uninspiring. As like any start up, we’re now adding new features every week, whilst trying to update the old V1’s, so of course, our process is ever updating the outdated, but that’s half the fun of it, right?

A big example of this was giving my O.T.T. Timeline a much needed rework from its first Jira-vibe iteration. If we’re putting this in front of students, we can’t expect them to want to interact with something even a project manager would feel upset by. To maintain the utility without undermining usability, I gave same space to breathe, removed some overcomplicated features and brought some life into it so it didn’t feel so ‘standard html education website’. This offered a clearer view to encourage some helpful engagement with an otherwise boring set of tasks to complete.

Now we just guide them to what they need, without the hassle.