Personalized Messaging Platform

As the Design Lead at Scoir, I worked to create a personalized, equitable college messaging platform that enabled colleges to connect meaningfully with students while fostering exploration. This project spanned three distinct audiences—students, families, and colleges—across platforms, focusing on enabling colleges to send personalized messages to high school students with minimal effort. Below is a breakdown of the project, tools, team, challenges, and the innovative solutions that emerged.

Design: Figma, Sketch

Research: Google Docs

Project Management: Jira, Asana

3 Engineers

1 Product Manager

1 Executive Stakeholder

Duration: 5 months

Start to Finish: September 2020 – January 2021

Product Design Lead: Driving the end-to-end design process.

Concept Development: Ideating and validating core functionality.

Branding, Illustration, and UI Design: Creating a cohesive visual identity.

Research and Testing: Understanding user behaviors and iterating on findings.

Build a personalized messaging platform that promotes fairness and equity within the Scoir ecosystem.

Help students discover colleges based on their own interests rather than defaulting to family recommendations.

Create an engaging, automated platform for colleges to connect with students.

Students often struggled to find colleges that aligned with their unique interests.

Most students relied heavily on recommendations from parents or peers, limiting their exploration.

Colleges needed an efficient way to personalize communications while respecting student autonomy.

Students: Existing Scoir users with registered accounts.

Integrate the solution into Scoir’s existing application with pre-built notification tools.

Design a new product for colleges that allows them to send anonymous, targeted messages.

Ensure students don’t feel overwhelmed by an influx of irrelevant or generic messages.

Collect basic preferences and relevant data from students to suggest matching colleges.

Build trust by gradually stepping through data collection during platform engagement.

Dynamically update content feeds based on student input and preferences.

Create a randomized feed of colleges that match student interests.

Incorporate rich, dynamic college content—photos, features, blogs, and announcements.

Boost engagement through virtual tours, student sessions, and event-driven content.

Allow students to input preferences that colleges can use to target personalized messages.

Equip colleges with a friendly UI to create automated, low-effort messaging campaigns, avoiding manual, one-off messages.

Enable colleges to develop rich, interactive content (articles, events, virtual tours) to engage students.

Automate content delivery to reduce administrative burden while boosting student exploration.

Provide students with control over their information and messaging preferences.

Encourage students to build curated college lists aligned with their interests.

Offer analytics to colleges, showcasing message performance, profile views, and dashboard activity.

Prompt colleges to create content tagged with student preferences to maximize engagement.

Conduct workshops and "How Might We" exercises to brainstorm solutions for encouraging exploration.

Interview students to understand how they currently discover colleges and what factors matter most in their decision-making process.

Students struggled with knowing where to start, resulting in "dead-end" platform behavior.

Existing users repeated actions without exploring new options or maximizing platform features.

Students wanted to hear from colleges in personalized, meaningful ways, not generic promotional messages.

Delivered high-fidelity prototypes for usability testing and feedback.

Collaborated with Product Management and Engineering to define the MVP.

Students valued the platform as a trusted resource and willingly shared information to improve their experience.

Personalized, interest-driven messages resonated far more than generic outreach efforts.

Colleges needed an effortless way to generate and deliver meaningful content due to their already-overwhelming workloads.

Revenue-driven UX features were less effective, often creating churn and misalignment with user needs.

Students demand a high level of personalization and control in their college search experience.

Colleges benefit most from streamlined tools that reduce effort while maximizing reach and engagement.

Analytics are as critical to the platform as the features themselves, offering valuable insights to both users and colleges.

This project successfully bridged the gap between students and colleges by fostering personalized, equitable connections. Students could explore beyond traditional recommendations and build meaningful college lists, while colleges gained a low-touch, automated way to engage with students based on real preferences. By prioritizing simplicity, trust, and collaboration, we delivered a solution that enriched the Scoir ecosystem and empowered both students and colleges.