ADORA EXPERIENCES

The future of college visits

Team

1 Designer
1 Co-Founder
2 Engineers

Toolkit

Figma
Adobe Suite (Ai, Pr)

Context

COVID-19 forced universities to shut down and prospective students needed a way to visit schools. Adora Experiences created an app to allow students across the globe to visit schools, just like they were there in person.

My role

As the lead UX Designer for this project, I designed and shipped Adora's entire mobile experience for both iOS and Android platforms.

My impact

Expanded Adora's product offerings

By championing features that advocated for the needs of our users, my work expanded Adora’s product offerings and currently helps students across the globe to tour schools.

Created a scalable design system for iOS, Android, and web

I created a reusable and scalable design system including various components, buttons, and color schemes.

THE CHALLENGE

There's a lack of authenticity and lack of student connection with virtual tours.

Product preview

Trust school tours

Visitors can preview a university’s tour and will understand what to expect.

Give users control

Visitors can personalize how they want to view their screen.

Connect with students

Student-drawn illustrations connects a visitor to a student.

Creating a user persona

To follow a human centered design approach to my project, I created a user persona named Alexandra.

About

Senior in high school, new to the admissions process

Goals

Open to exploring schools, wants to stay close to home

Pain points

Doesn’t trust tours, wants to connect to student

Design question

Throughout my project, this design question helped me ideate solutions and also focus on right pain points.

How might we create an authentic, trustworthy, and personalized experience on Adora?

Identifying constraints

In order to identify business, engineering, and design constraints, I led a strategy discussion with key internal stakeholders. These are the overarching constraints that I identified:

🕧

Limited time

The designs and features I create should be shipped to the engineering in 2 months so that the app could be launched at the end of the year.

📊

Limited information

Schools cannot guarantee that they'll provide new information within 2 months so my designs should include current data that we have from universities.

Prioritizing features

I also wanted to prioritize the features that my participants mentioned during my user research sessions. The highlighted features were feasible within the constraints above.

1 Take notes on the app

2 Sort function

3 Favorite and bookmark

4 School suggestions

5 School comparisons

6 Internal quiz to recommend schools

7 Image gallery

8 Search feature

The experience

Shape the future of Adora

Let visitors play an active role in shaping the entire app.

Have full control of what you're seeing

Give visitors control on how they want to see the gallery of schools.

Connect with a student

Student-drawn illustrations connects visitors and students.

Trust school tours

Visitors can preview a school tour and understand what to expect.

Success metrics

In terms of how I would measure success within this project, I would do so by:

Measuring the time that is spent on the landing screen

A higher amount of time would indicate that visitors are exploring the schools Adora has to offer.

Measuring the number of clicks on the sort button

A high number of clicks would indicate that visitors are personalizing their gallery view.

Learnings

⚖️

Create scalable designs

My designs should reflect the possibility that more schools will be added onto the app.

🙂

Spark joy and delight

Of course, designs should be intuitive but they should also be engaging and immersive.

Next steps

Conduct accessibility testing

I would conduct accessibility testing to ensure that I accommodate the needs of everyone. This is an area of design I'd love to expand upon and learn more about as a designer since the designs that I should create should empower everyone, not just the majority.