Context
Campus tour visits are proven as the most effective factor in choosing a University. We innovated campus tours using Virtual Reality. We wanted to re-imagine the campus tour experience with an emotionally engaging story through VR for prospective students. We saw VR as the ideal opportunity to increase revenue for our agency and our Higher Education Clients. We were in for a surprise when we uncovered a much bigger opportunity to solve significant challenges for our customers and their prospective students.
What was the problem/Challenge?
Each individual student is different and we strove to engage with them meaningfully.
One of our parents, Mary said "I have twins, I had to go through the same experience twice." Through her testimony, I understood the campus tour experience wasn't personalized. The final stage selecting a university is a campus visit, and our research showed these intimidated future students. We thought VR held the answer, but the data uncovered unforeseen challenges. So we pivoted...
Building a student-centric solution that's human, better, smarter, and most importantly, more human.
Our higher Education clients needed a defined purpose rooted and grounded in core human values to connect with their students deeply. We shifted from short-term engagement to empathizing with the audience through the lens of the future and a long-term vision. We accomplished this by building an interactive app that capitalized on peer and professor interactions, making the campus tour more attractive to future students.
Some students need more support during their decision making process than others, a blended business model was envisioned to recognize the spectrum of students’ needs. Engaging in-app content formed a supportive layer that helps students get organized, stay on track, and learn about the university to help them make smart decisions on selecting a college that was right for them. Students could connect directly with coaches, peers and teachers.
My role:
Lead the project from envisioning the experience from discovery to delivery. I partnered with strategists, insight team, and VP of higher-education, and researchers to uncover insights, to develop creative Strategy, empathetic research activities to guide and obtain key insights to shape experiences.
Defined experience architecture; Mapped out the student experience to define opportunities across campaigns, channels, media and technologies not just the app. Prototype design: build out experiences, student journeys, user flows and expected behavior.
I partnered with strategy teams to uncover insights, used a design thinking approach to develop creative Strategy, empathetic research activities to guide and obtain key insights to shape experiences.
A student-centric approach
Synthesized student’s needs based on an Empathy Map. I was able to dive deep into what students, think, feels and does. I started to understand actions and behaviors that motivated students and studied data from our interviews and Kantar research data for our centennial audience. We needed to understand their motivations, their goals, their needs and desires. What were centennials beliefs? What did they feel? My goal to develop a student-centric approach rooted and grounded in the core brand purpose to design an experience that our audience would love, that felt human, inspired and magical and they would feel connected to. This changed and defined our challenge.
Low-fidelity wire-frames
