In the third quarter of 2022 Study Group’s admissions team identified that there needed to be a way to reduce the amount of application forms submitted by agents. In turn this improves resource efficiency while at the same time improving conversions.

Requirements

• Create a student journey in PayOnline UI, where students are required to pay an application fee for each application form submitted.
• Use the existing PayOnline branding and definition guidelines.

Approach

With a tight design deadline I gathered any existing insights from the initial PayOnline design build, did a workshop with the team to start prioritizing and help form the strategy. We synthesized the data and moved onto implementing a customer journey map, a user flow and a wireframe which I then presented to some of the key stakeholders.

The optimal student journey within PayOnline, illustrating both the single and multiple destination country options, in the user flow (in the image below)

One of the key takeways from an ideation workshop was -

How can we display the application fees per destination country in the most efficient way?

• Initially we had the countries in a select list and the application fees on the same page which would display the applications fees only once a selection had been made. The downside to this is meant that the student may be under the impression that they are paying all that they have selected.
• We had decided that if we split this into two steps it would make it more obvious that only one selection can be made, while reducing cognitive load.

The final payment details screen.

The payment status screen once a payment has been made (in this case no more outstanding fees to pay).

Several design interations were made based on finding from multiple presentations involving the project team, cross-functional groups, and stakeholders. Unfortunately due to timeline constraints, usability testing was not feasible before go live.