Contribution
100%
100%
80%
Research
100%
80%
UI Design
Product
Team:
4 Designers
Role:
Freelance
Product Designer,
UI Lead
Timeline:
3 Weeks, Nov 2024
Background
Scholarship Moola is a scholarship-matching startup dedicated to helping students find legitimate, personalized scholarship opportunities. It aims to match students to personalized scholarships as well as create a supportive community for scholarship seekers.
Three designers and I were hired to conduct user research and create a minimum viable product (MVP) for Scholarship Moola’s founder, Amarone. Scholarship Moola is intended to go live in 2025. As the UI lead, I conceptualized and shaped the brand's development, created layouts and the majority of the components, and ensured all final assets were in-line with our visual brand and identity.
Just Interested in the end? Click to skip to the final designs!
Problem Space
The founder envisioned Scholarship Moola as a fresh, youthful scholarship website that appeals to its users with a modern ui, as well as with a unique sense of trust from their hand-vetted scholarships.
Our team had complete creative direction to explore solutions to create an initial version of this product, as no previous research had been conducted, which would go to developers by the end of 2024 with an intended 2025 launch.
Create and design a minimum viable product for the startup Scholarship Moola as a scholarship database to connect high-school scholarship seekers with scholarships in a way that elicits trust.
The Challenge
Research
The team analyzed major scholarship platforms such as Scholarship.com, Sallie Mae, College Board, and others. These platforms emphasized:
Search functionality and filters.
Professional but outdated design.
Quantity over quality in scholarship listings.
The standout competitor was Mos, which adopted a youthful and approachable design, similar to what our client requested.
In addition, the team evaluated competitors’ feature inventories. We determined there was a lack of personalization, communitys engagement, and tools for direct assistance for scholarships. These gaps aligned with Scholarship Moola’s community-forward ideas and presented opportunities for uniqueness.
Interviews
We conducted 13 in-depth interviews with current high-school or recently graduated students, 10 of which had applied to scholarships.
“The hardest part was definitely keeping track of all the different deadlines for scholarships and college admissions. They didn’t always match up, which made it stressful.”
Student 1
“It’s supposed to be difficult to get a scholarship, I guess, but I wonder why it has to be that way.”
Student 2
“Most of the scholarships I applied to were the easier ones because for the bigger scholarships, they require a lot more work and a lot more essays.”
Student 5
“Sometimes I'm just a little bit confused as to whether or not the scholarship applies to me. I know a lot of scholarships are targeted towards specific groups, and I just don't know whether or not I fall within that group, so I just don't apply.”
Student 3
Student 4
“Without scholarships, I wouldn’t have been able to afford college. They were my only way to pursue higher education.”
Key insights
Pain Point: Effort
Students found it difficult to apply to a lot of scholarships because some required a lot of effort, including unique writing prompts, long questionnaires, etc
Pain Point: Competitiveness
Students were demotivated by the competitiveness of the scholarships and felt like they “had no chances of winning anyways”, causing stress and for them to not apply to some scholarships they were considering.
Organizational System
Students wanted an organizational system to track their applications and would often do it manually.
Stress
Students were often juggling several responsibilities at once, and the addition of applying to scholarship caused them to feel stressed or overwhelmed.
Personas
From the interviews and research, our team came up with our primary persona, Miranda Motivated, and a secondary persona, Collin Coastings.
Miranda Motivated
Comes from a lower-middle class family so required financial aid to go to college
Has extracurricular commitments, as well as works a part-time job to save for college
Works with college advisor for application advice
Goals
Wants to definitely go to college
Wants to apply to the most amount of scholarships she can while still having time for her job, clubs, and college apps
Maximize money received
Collin Coastings
Comes from a middle class family where parents have promised to pay his tuition
Thinks financial aid would be nice to have, but not a necessity
Goals
Wants to receive scholarship awards for the least amount of effort
Minimize financial burden on middle class parents
Maximize chances of receiving the scholarship
Ideation
Our personas’ lead us to the following problem statement:
As a scholarship seeker who feels burnt out...
I need a better way to
find and organize appropriate scholarships that match my desired level of application effort, however I don’t know the best way to go about the application process and be a competitive candidate.
Feature Prioritization & Design Studio
The design process began with a collaborative design studio involving stakeholders to brainstorm and prioritize features. Features were categorized into “must-have,” “should-have,” and “could-have” tiers to ensure clarity in prioritization.
We decided to focus on 4 must-have key features:
Search and Filter
Saving scholarships
User Profile
Scholarship Information
And narrowed one “should-have” feature to focus on as a stretch goal: An Application Tracker.
We then created a user flow for our user Miranda to use Scholarship Moola:
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Next, the team developed mid-fidelity prototypes showcasing the platform’s core features. These included advanced filters for scholarship search, a personalized profile page, and a tracker with visual cues for application statuses like “to-do” and “in-progress.”
Notably, for the aspect of personalization, our team came up with an “auto-apply filters” on the search page, where toggling the option would automatically apply filters based off of the user’s profile page.
This was due to users 1. wanting filters for a sense of customization and familiarity and 2. the desire for not having to repeatedly select the same filters on re peat visits.
We also added an “Effort Level” filter, as well as an application status on each scholarship.
Usability Testing
To refine the prototype, we conducted usability tests with 8 users, 3 of them students, asking them to:
View their Profile
Update their GPA
Filter by low and medium effort
Sort by amount
Save the Pinecrest scholarship
View its scholarship information
View & Update tracker status
Usability Test
Synthesis
75% completed all Tasks Successfully
6 Users were able to complete all tasks without any guidance. The 2 who did not were both confused at the same area, updating their GPA. With further questioning, it was revealed that the confusion was with the lack of prototyping animation rather than the functionality.
75% understood the Auto-Filter
6 Users were able to describe what the auto-filter would do before actually turning on the toggle. All users were able to understand the toggle after application.
25% mentioned they would not use the in-app tracker
2 Users mentioned that they would not find the tracker feature helpful. Deeper questions revealed that 1 user found “To-do” and “In-progress” interchangeable, and one would want more features, such as a calendar integration or the ability to mark off individual requirements rather than the entire application.
Based on these insights, the team make a couple adjustments such as upping the font size to ensure the auto-filter description was more visible. The team also made notes on how the GPA field should be a text-box and other settings should interact to the developers. However, due to timeline constraints, exploration of expanding the app tracker was pushed to being a next step.
Brand Development
Trustworthy
Unreliable
Approachable
Reserved
Youthful
Old
Disconnected
Connected
Misinformed
Informed
From our research and client direction, I came up with a brand personality matrix. With approval from the client, I then iterated through different style guides. One important distinction was though the client wanted an approachable, youthful brand, he strongly did not want the site to come off as “childish”. With that in mind, I iterated through a couple pallets.
Final style guide with client approval.
Final Design and Next Steps
By focusing on the needs of high school students, We created an initial version of Scholarship Moola.
The platform enables students like Miranda and Colin to organize their efforts, prioritize opportunities, and ultimately achieve their scholarship goals.
Our client, Amarone, was successfully given a thorough hand-off file, as well as a research report and presentation by the team. The team has passed off the files to Amarone and his developers.
A walkthrough of Betty going through our final product!
A couple mockups of our final designs.
“Overall this is wonderful, thank you team! This has been amazing seeing from the beginning to where this is now. I’m very excited to see where this goes next…”
- Amarone Thatch, Founder / CEO
Scholarship Moola:
A Startup MVP To Connect Students with Trusted Scholarships
