The percentage of students aiming to study abroad is poised to increase in the future. While many students resort to loans to finance their overseas education, the high cost of guidance throughout the application cycle often not only hinders their access to international education opportunities but also undermines their potential to be completely aware of every step of the experience.
This existing scenario emphasizes the need for a comprehensive platform—one that empowers students to independently navigate through their application journey without having to expend thousands on study abroad counselors. UniQuest strives to address and bridge the current asymmetric information gap.
Initiating the process, nine notable competitors in the study abroad platform domain were identified. Following a systematic evaluation considering factors like popularity and relevance, the selection was refined to the top six competitors. The apps were downloaded and analyzed, taking into account their feature sets, web traffic analytics, strengths, and weaknesses. This analysis yielded valuable insights into the strategies of these competitors, setting the stage for the subsequent stages of research.
The team started with building a comprehensive interview guide which would later on help us conduct the interview smoothly and get useful insights.
12 user interviews were conducted either in-person or online.
After this the team converted the interview recordings into transcripts for doing a detailed thematic analysis. Using MAXQDA and Miro, the research team members collaborated on identifying the codes and generating themes for the qualitative data.
Click here to read the detailed research report.
The primary and secondary research aided in comprehending challenges faced by students in the current process. Additionally, it facilitated our understanding of the user, enabling the creation of a persona, empathy mapping, and a typical user journey.
Empathy Mapping
After a detailed brainstorming session over the ideas and features that could potentially solve the key challenges faced by students that were found out in the user interviews, the Information Architecture (IA) of the website was designed. This was followed by detailing out the user flows for key user goals.
With a clear skeleton of our website in mind, we set out to sketch the primary screens for our MVP. A lot of our ideation continued during the wireframing sessions. We then made necessary changes to our IA and user flows based on the new ideas.
With a clear skeleton of our website in mind, we set out to sketch the primary screens for our MVP. A lot of our ideation continued during the wireframing sessions. We then made necessary changes to our IA and user flows based on the new ideas.
