Overview
Curicular is an ed-tech startup aimed at making the college admissions process more affordable and equitable. Curicular utilizes AI technology and professional revisions to help high schoolers with college applications.
As lead UX Intern, I oversaw the redesign of their website in an effort to make it closer to their mission and communicate their values better. With a team of two other UX design interns, we conducted user research, made information architecture structures, ideated over wireframes and high-fidelity flows, and ultimately implemented the website on Wix.
I. User Research
As interns, our main task was to redesign the existing website and launch the first working iteration of the homepage. Before diving into designing, we all heuristically analyzed the website, finding flaws within the existing website. In addition, we conducted user research, surveying the audience demographic of high school students aged 15-18 looking to apply to 4-year universities.
Insights
- It was difficult to navigate the website as there was no clear-cut navigation. Links were broken and when the user tried to perform an action, it would lead to a dead end.
- The website was heavy in its use of flashy animations and extraneous/irrelevant illustrations and videos, detracting from the main purpose of the website. However, users noted that the site was generally visually pleasing!
- It was difficult for users to ultimately learn about Curicular's services and subsequently purchase them, as there were multiple CTAs with inconsistent copy that made it confusing as to how to navigate the site.
From there, we worked out user flows and information architecture structures.
How might we create an intuitive user flow that makes it easy for the user to 1) learn about Curicular's extensive services and 2) subsequently purchase such services?
How might we structure this website so that it is easy to navigate?
What are some ways to effectively communicate this on desktop/mobile?
II. Solution
Given these explorations, we started to build a high-fidelity version of the website. We established a style guide to keep the website consistent and to refine the Curicular brand a little. We chose a more muted palette to help aid navigation and an easily readable typeface.
In designing the final website, we divided up the work by sections: I designed the pricing page to create a seamless, efficient commerce experience within Wix’s constraints. Based on analytics, the pricing page is the most visited and has led to an increase in revenue for Curicular, showing that users are genuinely interested in Curicular’s services.
final product!
III. Reflection
As my first formal UX design internship, I learned a lot about UX design in the startup space and designing a product that users actually use. I was also fortunate to have an amazing team that I was able to learn a lot from and grow from as a designer and a professional!
Here are some invaluable insights that I learned throughout the internship:
1. Be flexible. Working in a relatively new startup, sometimes business goals and stakeholder decisions would change last minute. It was important to keep up with that to be able to best represent Curicular’s digital presence!
2. Conflict resolution in a design/professional space: I’ve done design critiques in classes and had to resolve conflicts in personal settings, but navigating differences of opinion within my team and with the executive team at Curicular was quite difficult (a growing pain!). What worked for me was to hold space to hear others’ opinions and from there work together to come to the best solution for both the Curicular team and the users of the Curicular platform.
