Student Success

‍Role: Lead UX Designer

‍Task: Design a Learn tab for the AscentConnect mobile app to allow users to access Student Success content.
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‍Team: Lead UX Designer (me), Product Manager, Front End Developer, Project Coordinator, Content Creator, Director of Student Success

introduction

Creating the Learn tab in the AscentConnect mobile app

AscentConnect is a mobile app for student borrowers to manage and pay their loans. In addition to being a student loan company, Ascent is also a student success company and so the content and management team wanted to incorporate a Learn Tab into our existing mobile app.

✏️ My Responsibilities

I was assigned as the Lead UX Designer of this project. I worked closely with content and development to launch a content tab and a micro-course for college students. This tab would allow users to access student success content and interactive micro courses. I was tasked with designing the entire feature.

Goals

01
Allow users to have easy access to organized content

02
Introduce interactive micro-courses (bundle content) into the V1 of the tab

03
Create a friendly and welcoming environment for college students

the process

Ideating and Facilitating

I started the design process by meeting up with the team and establishing goals and a timeline. We were on a tight timeline, and so that meant we couldn’t carve out time to conduct user tests. This meant that I had to drive design decisions by facilitating feedback sessions with the student success team and receiving critiques from the design team.

implementation

Communicating components with developers

I was in constant communication with developers when building out new components for the design system. It was important to provide implementation guides to specify the components and walk through template screens that the developers could implement for the content team to use.

Learn Tab

The main screen of the learn tab gives an overview of available content in the app. Users can explore content in the featured section or by categories.

Categories

The categories page allows users to explore content by different topics.

Guided Learning

The guided learning section displays different learning bundles. These are interactive micro-courses focused on important topics for college students. We launched the first version of the first bundle: Hacking Success.

Search Bar

A robust search feature allows the user to search content easily.

learnings

🎨 Building a design system

Before launching the entire mobile app, I worked on building the AscentConnect design system and its fundamental components. I collaborated with a UX Designer from the mobile team to produce the design system using the concept of base components. For the Student Success project, I contributed over 20 components to the existing design system and reviewed them with a designer from the mobile team.

✅ Validating designs without user testing

Working for a startup, sometimes you don’t have the time and resources to gather user data to validate designs in a project. In this project, I learned how to facilitate design feedback sessions and always frame questions and critiques with the user profiles in mind. It was also important for me to research other content apps and analyze them to get an understanding of how current mobile apps were designing content screens.