Cappex

Redesigning a website to help high school students search for colleges

Methods

User Interviews, Comparative Analysis, Heuristic Evaluation, Surveys, Persona, Sketching, Paper Prototyping, & Low Fidelity Prototype

Duration

12 weeks

Team

Crystal Shan, Juliana Lam, Neha Dhawan, Yilin Xue, & Yuan Lee

Role

UX Researcher & Designer

Problem Statement

Cappex experiences lower rate of engagement as compared to its competitors and wants to evaluate its search functionality.

Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic evaluation familiarized us with the workflow of Cappex's website and also introduced us to various problems associated. Browse through the following images to view some of the results of our heuristic evaluation.

Competitive Analysis

We found that most of the competitors did a better job with search and filters. We also found that their information architecture was better and most of the other websites made good use of infographics to convey the information.

Browse through the images of our competitors to view our findings from competitive analysis.

Students care about

Location

Finance

Job prospects

Major

Reputation

Feel of the college

They don't know what is important

Paper Prototypes

All team members then came up with wireframes based on our research. The five wireframes were combined into two main themes:

User logins and then the search results are displayed based on their profile information.
Users don't have to login and search has useful filters to narrow results.

After getting feedback, we decided to focus on the second theme where user can explore the website without logging in.