Helping Students Navigate the College Search

Setting the Stage​

Students facing the college search

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Students entering high school often dream about their future, but the college search can feel overwhelming. Hundreds of schools, countless decisions, and competing priorities leave many unsure of where to start or how to stay organized.

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About the Encourage app

The Encourage app, available on web and mobile, is designed to connect students' interests with real opportunities and help them plan for life after high school. The My Colleges feature helps students:

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• Explore and save schools based on their personal preferences

• Receive a personalized “Matched” list of up to 100 colleges after completing their profile

• Compare tuition, acceptance rates, GPA, and other key metrics

• Track whether they have applied to a school and save favorites

 

The goal of Encourage is simple but powerful: help students feel less overwhelmed and more in control of their college search.

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The Challenge

Too many options, too little guidance

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Even with helpful tools, students can feel lost when trying to make sense of their college options. Without guidance, the sheer number of choices can be paralyzing, and many students lose motivation when navigating the process on their own.

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The My Colleges feature exists to organize these options, but we needed to make it clear, intuitive, and encouraging, so students could confidently explore and save colleges without feeling defeated.

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Discovering the Problem

Listening first & designing with empathy

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As the Lead Content Designer, I approached this challenge with empathy. Students are already stressed about their futures, so my focus was to make the experience simpler, clearer, and more human, helping them feel confident and supported at every step.

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We gathered feedback through Pendo’s in app NPS surveys and a custom feedback button I wrote. I personally responded to many student messages so they knew we were being heard and that improvements were underway. As a product team, we combined that direct feedback with user data and pain point mapping across the My Colleges experience to identify where students needed the most support.

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Encourage supports students as they make some of the biggest decisions of their lives. By helping them stay organized and clearly see their progress, we offered information and helped them feel confident and in control of what came next. ​

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Make Progress Visible

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Problem:  Students couldn’t track the status of their top colleges.

Solution:

• Designed microcopy and status icons for the College Status Tracker

• Used visual cues to make each status scannable at a glance

• Added an element that allowed students to keep track of colleges they visited and space for visit notes.

 

Result: Feature adoption rose 28.9% after students viewed the Pendo guide