Project Overview
Role - Product Designer
Skills & Tools – User Research, Ideation, Facilitation, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Figma, Miro, UserTesting.com
Team - Liam McNeilis (Product Manager), Shareef Ayyad (Senior Service Designer), Stefan Hill (Senior Service Designer, Christie Tang (Senior User Researcher) and Join team developers (6 software engineers)
Timeline - 6 months
The Challenge
Most international students look to an recruitment agency when looking to applying to study abroad. BPP are partnered with agencies all over the world. When a prospective learner decides to study abroad, they will be assigned an agent from the agency who will help them throughout the whole application process.
The agents currently use Salesforce directly to input students information during the application process. The existing Salesforce system was not designed with agents in mind, resulting in significant challenges:
High complexity and training overhead: Agents required extensive training with average of 50 days of training for each agent before they can take on applications.
Poor data quality: Free-text inputs and manual processes led to incomplete or incorrect submissions. 83% of new applications have missing mandatory data in the first submission, 25% of accepted and registered students still have missing mandatory data.
Lack of visibility and communication: Agents struggled to track application progress and update stakeholders.
Manual intervention: BPP Internal staffs faced additional administrative costs and delays correcting errors.
Project Goals
Simplify the application process to minimise reliance on training.
Improve data accuracy through validation and structured inputs.
Enhance visibility into application statuses for agents and internal teams.
Reduce manual interventions for internal BPP staff.
Increase agent and student satisfaction by streamlining communication and workflows.
Discovery
Kick off Workshop
Collaborative sessions with BPP’s internal teams, including recruitment, admissions, and support, to map out the end-to-end application journey. These workshops revealed inefficiencies in agent onboarding, application tracking, and internal communication workflows.
Workshop
Rumsfeld Matrix - Known/unknowns
Agent Interviews
Conducted in-depth interviews with agents from diverse regions such as India, Pakistan, and Hong Kong. The goal was to capture cultural and operational nuances, understand regional challenges, and gather insights into their day-to-day workflows.
Interview notes
Storytelling - The agent experience
Mapped the agent’s journey from application initiation to completion, highlighting pain points such as complex navigation, lack of real-time updates, and manual data entry errors.
Storytelling artefact to illustrate current international experience from the emotional perspective of various actors within an agency
Design Solution
Problem 1 - Poor data entry
When submitting an application in Salesforce, not all 'required' information is made clear, leading to missed or incorrect information being entered. This results in X number of applications being initially submitted with errors, adding X time in internal admin, costing the business X cost.
Hypothesis
We believe that taking agents off of Salesforce and providing them with access to an 'agent friendly' application portal, as well as ensuring we gather ALL required application data, we will remove friction for the agent
Solution
All required fields in the application will have validation with clear validation message to inform the agents. Only once all the required fields are filled they can move on to the next stage of the application
Problem 2 - No communication with students
Agents can easily (and do) provide incorrect contact information for the learner, causing issues for BPP teams later on in the process when needing to contact the learner. This adds X time to the overall application process and can cause critical delays to the application and X more time spent trying to get in contact with students
Hypothesis
We believe that by improving our messaging as to WHY we require a student's email address and WHEN we might need to contact them
Solution
The agents will be required to input the student's email early on when creating the application. The agent will also be provided updates on the application to their email.
Once an applicant has been offered an place, agent will prompted to confirm the students contact details
Problem 3 - Lack of application updates
When an agent re-supplies missing information in Salesforce, they either forget to make a note on Salesforce or forget to email the BPP team. This communication loss results in delays in BPP reacting to and processing applications, risking the acceptance of applications and costing x more time per application at a cost of x
Hypothesis
We believe that by removing the burden from the Agent to 'manually update' BPP following an application update AND automatically and immediately notifying the relevant BPP team of application changes,
Solution
During the BPP review stage, if there is any missing/error with the application. The agent will be prompted with the issue on the portal and will have a task to complete. Once the agent has resubmitted it will notify the BPP team to review
Problem 4 - Low visibility of application timeline
Throughout the application process, Agents need to manually calculate deadlines & timelines for multiple applications at multiple universities for a single student. For less experienced or new agents this can be challenging to keep track of and can result in missed application deadlines which could negatively impact the number successful applications and cause upset and additional stress to hopeful students.
Hypothesis
We believe that by displaying 'real time' application milestones and timelines, we will allow the Agent to give timely advice to students and make the most informed application decisions.
Solution
The Agent will be provided with an overview of all the applications they are handling with all the key info and what stage each application is, filtering option will also be provided for an quicker access to specific applications.
Clear prompts and notifications during the application process on what stage the applicant is in
User Testing
Once I created the prototype, I worked closely with the senior user researcher and senior service designer to plan and carry out user testing sessions with agents across the world such as India, Pakistan, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Our objectives:
Evaluate the experience of completing the application and key tasks such as navigating between sections, filling out the form and uploading documents.
Investigate how the new experience compares to the current experience using salesforce, and whether it addresses the pain points faced in the current experience.
To identify how we can improve the experience application experience.
Figma prototype tested on Teams with agents in Malaysia
Figma prototype tested on Teams with a agent in India
Analysis
We held a collaborative session to go over the raw notes from the testing and started synthesizing the findings across the end to end journey. We also used this session start rating the priorities and impact of each findings from high to low.
Key Insights
Overall experience
The new experience is an improvement from the existing experience:
Average rating for current experience: 2.5/5
Average rating for new portal: 4.25/5
Agents liked the new design, thought it was easy to use and simple and straightforward to go through.
We learned about how they would approach each page, and received feedback on what could be changed or improved throughout the journey.
Application overview page
Background information
Qualifications
Offer stage
Based on the insights, I iterated the designs before working with the development team for the build. The MVP of the portal was first released to agents in the top 3 countries, India, Pakistan and Malaysia. Since then it has been published to agents across the world.
The Impact
Quantitative Results
Reduce Salesforce licensing cost from £400k per annum to £0
Reduce average days of training staff from 50 days to 0
Reduce application submitted with missing data from 83% to 0%
Qualitative Feedback
Agents praised the intuitive interface and clarity of instructions.
Internal teams reported significant time savings and reduced frustration.
Students experienced better communication and transparency throughout the process.
Reflections and Learnings
What Went Well
Addressing Core Pain Points: The portal successfully tackled the key issues of complexity, error-prone submissions, and communication gaps. Feedback from agents and internal teams confirmed that the redesign significantly improved their workflows.
Collaborative Approach: Engaging stakeholders from the outset ensured alignment and uncovered valuable insights. Workshops and user interviews were instrumental in shaping a solution that met diverse needs.
Improved Scalability: The modular design of the portal allows BPP to onboard new agents and adapt to future changes with ease.
Challenges
Bias in Early Interviews: The presence of managers in initial interviews hindered honest feedback from agents. Adjusting the process by excluding managers in later sessions led to more candid and valuable insights.
Cultural and Regional Challenges: Managing interviews across different countries required adapting to diverse languages and cultural nuances.
Next steps
During this whole project we only focused on the agents however when looking at the end to end journey we notice there were lots of unknowns for us in the international students experience space.
Since then we have kickstarted a project to look at the north star vision of the international student experience and what that will look like by 2026.