TAL SALTZMAN
USER EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
SUMMARY
IvyWise, a premier college admissions counseling firm, tasked me with a complete re-design of their student portal. After many years of updates and “band-aid fixes” within the myIvyWise Portal, they required a new, modernized design, changes in functionality, and a revamped user experience. I worked with the IvyWise team to build a portal that was intuitive and efficient for our team as well as parents, students, tutors, and counselors.
TIMELINE: 1 YEAR
ROLE: UX COORDINATOR
NAVIGATION
We initiated the design process with the navigation, as it is the main functionality of the portal. The original navigation in the IvyWise portal was busy and overwhelming to users. The solution was to collapse the static navigation into a modernized hamburger menu.
SCHOOL APPLICATION PAGES
The School Application Pages are a section of the portal where administrators input relevant essay application information for each school. Both the sidebar information input form and the essay input form have been completely revamped to allow for new dynamic options. Administrators are now able to create essay categories and indicate if an essay is University-Wide, Program-Specific, or International.
SCHOOL LIST
The School List will now be more dynamic than ever. Now, students, counselors, CR admins, and parents can keep track of a student's list of schools. It now serves as the main point of access point to all of a student's essays. Students are now able to see all of their essays directly on the school list page, whereas before they had to go to the "essays" tab. They are also able to choose programs within each school, and choose specific essays from multiple options.
There are now more obvious progress indicators and essay status tags, in addition to newly added percentage-complete labels, which all aide in better informing the user where the student's essays and supplements are at in the overall process.