iOS Messaging

Overview

With the unfortunate widespread devastation of COVID-19, Higher Education was forced to change the way they interact with potential students. What was once traditional face to face relationship building, would now be strictly digital. At RaiseMe our college partners needed a way to communicate more efficiently with potential students. Students were already receiving bulk emails from colleges but this was disconnected from their experience with RaiseMe and earning scholarships on their desktops and in the app. The core idea was to give colleges a direct line of communication to students in context with their college search experience.

Team

Product Manager: Dan Robichaud-Carew

User Researcher: Thea Lee

Engineer: Luke Lovett

Matheo Fiebiger

Insights

From research on student communities, we knew a couple of things about student communication. Students wanted a way to communicate with colleges but found the process daunting. There was no form of direct communication other than campus visits, phone calls, and email. By having direct communication, students could learn more about a university earlier in their decision-making process and make more informed decisions in service of themselves and their futures.

Navigation

This feature required a slow rollout and to start because most students wouldn’t have received a message by the time of launch. For this reason, we had to be very strategic with how students accessed the feature knowing that most to start won’t have a message. In options 1 and 2 I looked at having a messaging icon in the header. In option 3 I redesigned the navigation to include messages. Knowing most inboxes would be empty to start option 4 worked best. The feature would be tucked away on our “More” page but push notifications would make new messages visible.

Card design

Working with the Product Manager and our Partner Success team I was able to better understand the needs of our college partners. Partners were able to send three types of messages: a bulk message to multiple students, a single message to a student on behalf of a university, a message from a college counselor on behalf of the university. These three types of messages would need different types of displays. The three messages could not be threaded together although they are from the same university because the messages could be written by three different individuals all communicating about different things.

Personas

We broke down our student users into four personas.:

The Lost: a user who didn’t have clear directives.
The motivated explorer: users who had goals but unclear. Students who know what career they want to pursue or college they want to go to but unclear of the steps to get there.
The unmotivated doer: unclear goals and clear tasks.
The motivated achiever: clear goals and clear tasks.

We typically focus more on motivated explorers. For this feature, we wanted to index heavier on the students who were lost, unsure of their college journey, and needed help. The “lost” would be the students that might be apprehensive to interact with colleges, less likely to initiate a message with a school or unsure what to ask of a school. I designed the components within messaging specifically catered to this group.

We typically focus more on motivated explorers. For this feature, we wanted to index heavier on the students who were lost, unsure of their college journey and needed help. The lost would be the students that might be apprehensive to interact with colleges, less likely to initiate a message with a school or unsure what to ask of a school. I designed the components within messaging specifically catered to this group.

Designing for the lost

Designing for the group who we considered had the least knowledge about college planning or the least amount of experience interacting with higher educational institutions before, meant we had to provide communication tools that they may not be aware of. I opted to make the empty state text that on any other messaging service like Twitter or Facebook might be “Write a message here” to “Hi Dan, Thanks for reaching out to me I appreciate…”. This would immediately signal to students the need for email etiquette even if they had never written an email before. The chat function was designed to feel less daunting but still have the formal functionality of email to emphasize to students that this is an authority figure who has bearing on your collegiate career.

Feature Onboarding

Designing for the lost also meant acclimating them to the new feature. This was the persona group that would be least likely to initiate contact with a university or be apprehensive about replying. I designed an initial message that is sent from RaiseMe as a way to 1: Let users — especially the lost — understand what the messaging feature is for. 2: Give them an opportunity to use the feature although they have not been directly messaged by a partner yet. This makes the feature less daunting in the future. This needed to be designed in such a way that users understand it’s not a chatbot but just a method of onboarding. I worked alongside our user researcher to present through copy what the messaging feature could do and how it could be used.

Launch Options

One of the points of contention between the team with this project was which version of the design to launch given technical constraints. A portion of the team wanted to launch quickly and launch an experience that would only show incoming messages and no in-app reply functions to save the backend work for after launch. Some wanted to push the feature out so it could include a reply label noting when a student replied from their email client which would be the only option. I wanted to push the launch timeline out even longer for the most optimal experience. An experience where users didn’t have to open their email client to reply, they didn’t receive confirmation labels that they replied to a message, only a simple chat function where they could reply directly to an email. An omnichannel experience would allow for students to stay within the app without leaving.

Wayfinding

Navigation within a message was tough because much like other messaging services there was a possibility to go deeper to inner pages. The user would need a way to navigate out. Keeping the navigation consistent throughout allowed for users to select college after college get deeper and deeper and still be able to navigate away to a new tab.

Reflection

In its early state, the messaging feature is more supplementary than anything. It provides students the ability to read messages in context to other college planning actions they take, following, earning, achieving. As the capabilities grow for a student on the platform, messaging is more likely to become complimentary, where distinct actions can be taken within the features that are a core part of college planning as well.