ScholarPro
2023 | Personal project
The problem
In today’s academic environment, many students turn to volunteering for scholarships as a means of financial support. However, behind the scenes, scholarship coordinators face significant challenges in efficiently managing these volunteer students. Existing systems are outdated and fail to meet their specific needs, leading to disorganization, inefficiencies, and diminished motivation. The ScholarPro aims to remedy these issues by providing a tailored system for coordinators, streamlining the management process and empowering them to focus on guiding and supporting students, ultimately enhancing the scholarship experience for all stakeholders involved.
The Solution
ScholarPro is a platform connecting students with scholarship opportunities. It centralizes management for coordinators, facilitating oversight of details, progress tracking, messaging, task management, meeting approvals, scheduling, and more.
This interface targets scholarship coordinators, streamlining their workflow for efficient management.
Research process
Throughout the research process, I leveraged a diverse array of tools to gain deeper insights into the target audience. Given the product’s appeal to a professional demographic, I prioritized comprehending their specific needs and daily routines to ensure alignment with their professional requirements.
The tools I used during the research:
Personal Interviews
Empathy map
Target Audience
Information Architecture
Interviews
During the initial phase of the research, I conducted in-depth, phone-based interviews with scholarship coordinators to gain insights into their daily routines and uncover their pain points.
Through these conversations, several key challenges emerged:
- Tool Overload
Coordinators expressed frustration with the current system’s limitations, which only permit approval or rejection of volunteer meeting reports. Managing scholarships requires juggling multiple tools like Excel, WhatsApp, email, and various task and time management systems, leading to confusion and disorder.
- 24/7 Communication
The bulk of communication between coordinators and volunteers occurs through WhatsApp, inundating coordinators with messages round-the-clock. Many messages arrive outside of working hours, infringing upon coordinators’ privacy and blurring the boundaries between work and personal time.
- Lack of Guidance
Coordinators highlighted the absence of mentorship or support mechanisms within their roles. They often struggle to navigate challenging situations and expressed a desire for peer consultation with other experienced coordinators.
- Meeting Approval Overload
A significant aspect of coordinators’ responsibilities involves confirming the occurrence of meetings. However, existing interfaces present meeting reports in a restrictive table format, hindering coordinators’ ability to gain a comprehensive understanding. Consequently, volunteers resort to sending additional meeting details via WhatsApp, further burdening coordinators with excessive messages.
Empathy Map
I created an empathy map by delving into the coordinators’ feelings and emotions through interviews, enriching my understanding of their experiences. This helped identify key pain points, informing the generation of innovative feature ideas to address their needs effectively.
Target Audience
Following extensive user research, I crafted a persona embodying our target audience:
Age Ranges: 20-35
Information Architecture
Upon completion of the user research phase, I developed an information architecture chart to outline the interface’s structure and map the necessary screens. This visual aid proved invaluable in comprehending the interface’s complexity and selecting an optimal navigation structure.
Armed with user research insights, I seamlessly transitioned to wireframes, laying the groundwork for the precise crafting of the system.
Wireframes
During the wireframing process, my priority was to enhance the personal connection between coordinators and volunteers while fostering a sense of community among coordinators within the organization.
However, the primary objective of the interface remains to serve as a convenient and intuitive tool for scholarship coordinators, equipped with all the necessary features for efficient volunteer management, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable user experience.
Final Result
Navigation
Menus
I opted to divide the navigation into two menus to establish a clear separation between instant actions—such as notifications, direct messages, and profile actions—and routine actions like scheduled meetings, prioritized tasks, and contact information.
Additionally, I chose to separate meeting reports and applications from the rest of the menu items to provide them with more focus, as these pages are continuously updated based on student reports and new applications, often displaying a badge with the number of new items.
The coordinator can minimize the side menu to expand the working area by clicking on the chevron next to the logo.
Dashboard
The dashboard serves as the primary landing page upon entering the system, offering coordinators quick access to essential data and updates regarding students and their daily tasks.
Schedule
The coordinator can effortlessly access their meetings for the day, complete with details such as location and duration. They also have the option to view meetings for other days or edit specific meetings by simply clicking on the edit icon button.
Charts & Interactions
The coordinator can easily track the management of new applications and obtain more detailed information on each step page by clicking on the corresponding boxes.
Additionally, they can quickly assess the status of ongoing student meetings, including how many are meeting their hourly commitments and who may be experiencing challenges.
This information is crucial for coordinators to ensure smooth management and identify areas for improvement or assistance.
To-Do list
The coordinator can access a list of their open tasks, enabling them to prioritize their responsibilities effectively. They have the flexibility to rearrange the order of tasks according to their preference, add due dates, and assign priority badges as needed.
This ensures that they can efficiently manage their workload and address tasks in a timely manner.
Top community posts
To fulfill the coordinators’ need for community engagement and easy consultation with others within the organization, a dedicated community area has been established, resembling a social media feed, such as Facebook.
Here, coordinators can create posts, tag them for easy reference, search for specific tags, and engage with other coordinators through comments and likes, fostering collaboration and support among peers.
Meeting reports
The meeting reports page enables the coordinator to approve all reported meetings submitted by the students. These reports may include not only regular meetings but also tutorial hours, monthly meetings with the coordinator, etc. The page is divided into two sections: new reports, which require approval from the coordinator, and past reports.
Expandable Table rows
I have designed the reports in a combination of table and cards, allowing coordinators to scan them in two different ways:
- Table View: This view displays the reports in a condensed table format without expanding the accordions. It is best suited for quick approval of monthly meetings or tutorials that have fewer details and can be processed efficiently in bulk actions.
- Card View: In this view, all accordions are expanded, presenting each meeting as a story with details, descriptions, and sometimes attached photos. This view is recommended for reviewing regular meetings, where each meeting holds significant information that warrants individual attention.
Sort
The coordinator can conveniently sort the reports by name, date, duration, rate, etc., by clicking on the sort icon next to the column title.
Filters
By clicking on the “Filters” button, the coordinator can easily filter the reports based on their specific needs, allowing them to focus on particular reports and perform bulk actions efficiently.
Bulking
The coordinator can review all meetings by clicking on the checkbox column at the top or by selecting specific meetings individually. They have the option to send the same message to all selected students, add identical notes to all reports, or approve/reject all meetings simultaneously.
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