Year Up
Redesign of the referral process
Why aren’t more young adults seizing this opportunity to change their lives?
Year Up is a free, one-year workforce training program dedicated to closing the opportunity gap for young adults entering the workforce. Most people find out about the program from a friend or family member. Year Up wanted to increase the number of referrals submitted and decrease the time it takes enrollment staff to process referrals.
My role
I led a small team of designers hired by Year Up, coordinated all of our needs with our stakeholders, and took the lead on user research and synthesis.
What I did
Interviewed users and stakeholders
Conducted heuristic evaluations
Created user personas and journey maps
Provided feedback to designers on their work
Getting a grip on the process
We started by conducting interviews with all the different types of users involved in this process - the people being referred, the person doing the referring, and the enrollment staff - and then creating an affinity map to organize what we had learned. We found that although users were able to find the referral form on Year Up’s website, most alumni chose not to use the form to refer someone. And those who were referred were never followed up with by Year Up staff.
We also conducted a heuristic evaluation of the referral form as it appeared on mobile devices. We noticed a lack of system status visibility and aids for users to recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.
Mapping out users’ experiences
With clear trends identified from our research, we created three distinct user personas for each type of user involved in the process. For each persona, we created a problem statement, a journey map, and a user flow.
Jesse needs a clearer method of referring his friends so that he can share this life-changing program with them.
Jesse is our alumni persona. He loved his experience with the program, and wants a clear way of referring his friends. He isn’t sure how to go about this, so he just talks to his friends about checking it out.
Among other small recommendations, we suggested adding an email address field to the form for the person submitting it so that the system can send them an automated email to confirm their referral and provide further information about the process.
London needs more immediate feedback so that she knows what’s going on and how to proceed.
London is our prospective student persona. She’s passionate about planning for the future, but feels a little lost. London’s main pain point is that she hasn’t received a quick response from Year Up.
Our suggestions to improve London’s experience centered around the system sending an automated email as soon as she’s been referred, providing further information about the program and process.
Megan needs an automated method of processing referrals so that she can focus more on leads already in Salesforce.
Megan is our enrollment staff persona. She loves her job at Year Up and the feeling of helping disadvantaged people find hope and opportunities. But the current processes are very manual and take a lot of her time and energy.
We recommended that Year Up add a few form fields and connect the form to their Salesforce account so that they’ll be able to automate the entire beginning of the process.
Designing for different users
With a pretty full understanding of our different users’ experiences, we began our redesign of the referral form on the Year Up website. We drew some preliminary sketches and quickly moved to creating wireframes of the ideas we had discussed. We worked together to increase the fidelity and design the interactions from one screen to the next, including what happens if errors are submitted.
After completing our prototype, we conducted usability tests to see what our users would make of it. All of our users were able to submit a referral in a small amount of time, and were pleased with the simplicity of the form and experience.
Year Up was pleased with what we had found and designed for them, and implemented most of the changes we recommended, making a successful future that much more accessible for thousands of future students.
