Higher Education Counseling needs a reboot
Finding the right Degree in the right University is a nightmare. It’s an anxiety from which most High School seniors suffer each year. Why is it such a pain?
- All Universities use a complex jargon to describe thousands of their programs, mostly using buzzwords. This makes Higher education a real jungle.
- Students can’t find the information they need. That is a flaw as they are not the first ones to search for Bachelor degrees. Each year millions of students are lost when looking for answers to their personal questions. It shouldn’t be a treasure hunt.
So how come there is no virtuous circle where University students would counsel High school students?
This year, I am designing a tinder-like app for High school seniors to connect, exchange, and learn from University students.
Speaking to Gen Z
Before starting the design, I had to understand the key features of my audience, and the underlying secrets of the apps they love.
Key Features of the audience (Gen Z):
- Short attention span (approx. 8 seconds)
- Love communities, shareable content (making viral content mainstream)
- See not read
- Use an app the way they want, not how the app is made
Underlying secrets of the apps they love:
- Design is crucial
- Gamified content
- In-house messaging
- Multi-usage platforms (talk, watch, learn, share)
Onboarding: Simple, personalized and fun
We need information about the user. A lot (general information, age, education, interest, studies, current status of applications…). How can we get all these information without losing the user in the process?
Menty’s onboarding process is hugely inspired from Zenly’s great experience (https://uxdesign.cc/the-zenly-experience-a-product-case-study-55e148b0d0e4), where one information is asked per screen. This enables a smooth and quick (less than 3 min) onboarding ride, without harassing the user. With this onboarding process we can collect (with respect to GDPR of course) more than 40 metrics on each user.
The enrollment phase is not the same if you are a high school senior and a uni student, as both do not use the app the same way. One is looking for answers, while the other is here to share his/her experience. So we created a mirroring process for the information provided by the seniors to become complimentary to those given by uni students. For example, in the question ‘what info are you looking for’, a senior would select tag words like ‘personal statement’ or ‘campus life’. The uni students would answer the question ‘how can you help students’, and his answers would increase the match result with certain seniors.
We know that a 3 min onboarding can be a long time (try holding your breath for 3 min!) so we created a pause button for the user to stop at any time, and resume later on his profile. This enables a gamified view of the profile in the homepage (see below). In the required information, students also have the choice between uploading a picture of themselves or using a personalized avatar. I think that choice is an important feature today that is often left on the side.
Gamification by Design
To create a real community, gamification is key.
- Profiles: built using stages that you unlock one after the other to increase user engagement and retention on the app.
- Mentoring level: all uni students will start at the same level (Player), and will progress by helping more and more students. This will come with a reward: the higher they rank up, the more they can increase their pricing on the app. These levels enable mentors to change their price range. It’s pure logic: if you have experience in helping a lot of students, your overall value will be higher. The different levels are not detailed out so that progression becomes a treasure hunt.
- ‘Auntie’, the uni application Tracker: university application is endless and requires tons of documents (personal statement, reference letter, CV…). Built like a simple planner, the tracker enables seniors to follow their progress and keep up with all uni requirements. This is also a great way for Mentors to be proactive: once they match with High School students, they will have access to their tracker and will be able to offer the right services to successfully complete the student’s uni applications.
- ‘Brain’, our blog: we strongly believe that knowledge is circular. With blog posts, students can share best-practices to create a CV, or their tips & tricks to choose your dream university. This feature enables the creation of a community where students can learn from others, and share their experiences.
- ‘Agora’, our forum: to get users to become actors on the app. You can create communities based on the information you would like to get or share (e.g. Studies in Spain). There is also a general board for people to ask random questions. There is also an anonymous feature to ask any question, freely.
User-centric app
User-centric is a buzzword (sorry for using it!), but when we say it, we mean it. To build Menty, we got inspired by the best features of Gen Z’s favorite app. During that exercise, we also noticed that while all of them looked nice, most were built the wrong way.
We created an app where it is easy for seniors to find, connect and exchange with uni students. Our Match Algorithm focuses on more than 40 metrics. This ensures that seniors are presented only the highest matching uni students available. The overarching objective of the product is not for users to spend the longest time possible on the app, but to find the most efficiently what they are looking for. In simple terms: quality over quantity. It’s a win-win situation as they save time and we get happy customers!
High school students are the only ones that will swipe through the profiles. That is why we designed them for max efficiency: removing all noisy information and focusing on what matters: they know the answers to the students’ questions! The students can analyze the profiles very quickly and decide whether or not they should connect with them. If they select a profile, they will have access to more information on the uni students and see his price range depending on the services (1 hour call, help on personal statement…). The ‘heart’ icon also enables the seniors to save profiles and come back to them at a later stage.
This was a quick recap of how we designed the Menty product, and how we implemented it on the app. At Menty, the students are the product, the customer and consumer. That’s why it’s fun to build such a social initiative. Hope you liked it. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
Thank you very much for reading!
If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to comment or send them to contact@menty.social. For those of you who want I can also share the Figma wireframe.
For more info: https://menty.social/
