The goal was to improve the communication and transparency between school staff and parents, by refining the steps involved in the enrolment process.
I spearheaded the redesign of 4 enrolment application user flows for parents/carers to achieve a higher application submission rate, resulting in a 70% increase in submissions, a 10% decrease in user drop-offs, and a 20% reduction in administrative follow-up time.
Background
This project involved the complete service and UX/UI design of the Online Enrolment portal and internal school enrolment platform. This project was based on feedback from surveys, support teams and school interviews, where some problems were identified, including:
School staff workload increased
An increase in effort from parents/carers to complete a full application
Uncertainty of security and process
The project began with an in-depth review of the enrolment process that parents and school administrators go through, identifying communication touchpoints where parents drop off, causing fewer enrolment submissions. I focused on translating user research findings from both users into creating new dashboard and email design concepts to improve content clarity and communication with parents.
Below is the process that I followed. Due to the tight design schedule, I didn't have time to conduct usability testing.
Our research findings suggest…
That school administrators face several challenges when communicating with parents about the next steps required for the Full Enrolment application after submitting an Expression of Interest (EoI) application. Some things following submitting an EoI confused parents as they are also:
Provide additional supporting documents
Requesting details about the child to update their student records
Other actions that might occur
This whole process starts on the public school’s enrolment page, where parents can choose which type of enrolment they want to enrol their child into. Although the Moving to High School two-step process redirects parents to a new page, it doesn’t explicitly convey these steps. This is the old version of the Enrolment page.
I worked with the Service Designer, Product Owner, Business Analyst, and Web Application Developer to narrow the project's scope and what can be achieved by the end of 2-3 weeks. I framed my HMW problem statement:
How might we make the enrolment process clear for parents/carers, so that they understand the timings and actions required when they submit an Expression of Interest application and full enrolment application to their preferred school(s) of choice?
This problem combines some common themes that arose in past research interviews, making sure we address high-priority users’ needs.
OUR SOLUTION
Designing for a parent who is enrolling their Year 7 child for the first time
Given that for this example, Moving into High School enrollment application, parents normally either complete this once, depending on how many children they have. In 2022, we had over 15,000 Moving into Year 7 applications. With this number increasing over the next few years, I needed to improve the High School enrolment page to visually highlight and/or guide the parent to understand the process they go through.
These interfaces included:
Showed a bulleted list of the key cut-off times for each application
Added an in-page alert on the Online Enrolment Hub dashboard to notify parents of "Next Steps"
Created an automated email for a 7-day reminder and a 3-day reminder for parents.
These features were added to the screens below (as shown by the green stars), where I helped to identify where parents drop off, or improve the content and layout of the enrolment process.
The mockup below uses a different font family and colour palette that protects the department's privacy policy in sharing disclosed designs.
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