NorthStar
Role
UI/UX Designer, Graphic Designer, User Researcher
Timeline
Semester-long project in Fall 2020
This UX design case study developed a network for rural high school students to aid in their post-graduate planning. NorthStar is not only a user-friendly way of providing information, but it also fosters an online community for students to engage with their peers.
Overview
As a graduate from a rural high school in Pennsylvania, I had first-hand experience with navigating the complex college application process. Like many rural high school students, my counselors and teachers had inadequate experience with college-bound students and had too many students to adequately mentor any one individual. While there are some options to help these underserved students, like college and career immersions or online forums, these solutions are either not widely available, have significant financial barriers, or foster a toxic environment. During the fall of 2020, myself and three other students conducted research with a few of these students and developed the concept of NorthStar, a remotely accessible mobile and desktop application which helps rural high schoolers plan and track their post-graduate futures. We developed a prototype of our design in Figma.
The Problem
Students at rural high schools lack the resources and support to make informed decisions about their future.
Idea
NorthStar is an application designed to provide personalized and accessible information to rural high schoolers, tailored to their unique interests and background. The design also fosters an online community for students to engage with their peers in other rural areas of the US to support them in their post-graduate plans. We designed the prototype to reflect what this experience will look like on mobile, but the concept is inclusive of a desktop version to accommodate a greater level of accessibility. Further, our team designed this application specifically for a student user, though our design would also provide interfaces for other stakeholders, like parents, teachers, and counselors.
Challenges
Our challenge was making the application more than just a compilation of relevant information, since our users would otherwise get information through internet searches. Through user interviews and evaluation, we determined a desire for mentorship and guidance through the post-graduate planning process, as our audience reported feeling lost, isolated, and unsupported. Our team needed to determine how to best provide both easy-to-navigate information and personalized mentorship, without adding additional stress through a complex interface. The functionalities of NorthStar are inclusive of these considerations and were tested by our target demographic.
Personalization
When offering an intervention during high school, we knew it was crucial to be aware of the incredibly diverse college, career, and life paths that students prepare to embark on. As such, it is important that our design can accommodate as many interests and goals as possible. It was also key to understand that our audience would need information personalized to their knowledge of certain college/career terminology. Specifically, high schoolers- especially in rural areas- don’t have the vocabulary of unfamiliar college-based constructs, like office hours, colleges/universities, or financial aid terminology.
Onboarding was designed to make this information as personalized to the student as possible to best tailor their content. Rather than focusing on specific destination goals (ex, architect, illustrator, engineer) we used interests and broad pathings to adjust the content. By tailoring content based on more simplistic, subject-based interests, the app feels less intimidating and can offer a wider variety of suggestions for the student to consider. Throughout the app, we were also careful to use familiar language.
Exploration
Exploration is especially important for high school students, and is particularly challenging for rural students. Rural students often don’t have the same access to surveying their different options. For instance, college-bound students might attend rural high schools which do not have connections to larger universities, depriving them of the opportunity to speak with college students or tour campus.
The landing page of NorthStar is structured in a way that displays the most relevant resources first such as student stories, then ends with colleges to explore based on their goals and interests so that students can learn more about opportunities that are available to them in a more tailored and targeted way. This reduces the risk of being overwhelmed with abundant information, while still presenting unique resources. There is also a ‘Search’ option that enables student users to explore other interests they might not have previously thought of - providing students with the right amount of flexibility to learn about other opportunities that might also be a good fit for them.
Mentorship
From interviewing our users, we found that they lacked a sense of mentorship to serve as a guide through a challenging process. Rural students’ guidance counselors or teachers are typically too busy or lack the experience and training to adequately help students- especially those with less-common paths. Rural students also experienced a lack of peer support from other students when following regionally atypical paths. An absence of mentorship is discouraging, isolating, and confusing for an already stressed student.
One distinguishing feature that sets out to address this is student stories from college students who previously attended rural high schools. These stories would include the author’s experience coming from a rural high school and would include tips and advice. This feature aims to make the exploration process less intimidating and more relatable as a whole. We wanted to cultivate personal relationships between users and other rural high school students so that students can interact with people in similar situations and have a similar background as they do. In this way, they will feel less alone in the college planning process.
Mentorship can also exist at a peer level, as students can help one another through the process or bounce ideas off of each other. Rural high schoolers can struggle to find a peer at their school who is following the same path. Thus, we created a community feature in the app for students to ask questions in a low-pressure environment.
Progress Tracking
The progress page is another "companion" feature that offers a way for students to visualize their goals, tasks, interest, and planning. We wanted to make students' needs more salient by allowing users to track their progress year by year throughout their high school career. For example, a freshman would be in the ‘discover’ phase, to which the app provides suggestions on what she can focus on during her freshman year. This breakdown of the college and career process, as a whole, aims to make it less daunting to students, and to increase their confidence. This page also allows users to look back at pages they have previously saved and track the connections that they've made on the community page in order to bond with other students with similar interests and circumstances.
The Takeaway
Addressing the issue of inequitable access to college and career preparation resources for rural high school students is a challenging endeavor; NorthStar addresses this challenge by providing personalized resources that are inclusive of the rural high school student context and interests. Upon reflection, we recognize that while our solution is not an entirely novel concept, NorthStar’s success lies in providing personalized resources inclusive of the rural high school student context and their needs - resources that rural students ordinarily wouldn’t have access to - and translating otherwise sensitive and seemingly intimidating information in a digestible and approachable way. We recognize that our solution is really most impactful not when it is just used once, but when it is used continuously throughout the student's high school experience, so evaluating the impact of our design over a student's 4-year high school journey and even when they enter college is important. Overall, we seek to continuously improve on our existing design by taking into consideration the holistic perspectives of all stakeholders involved in a rural high school student’s post-graduate preparation experience.