V School
New Student Portal Boosts Learning Resource Discovery and Access by 84%
Summary
Problem
New students at V School (a tech bootcamp) struggled to gain and maintain learning momentum because they had difficulty finding their learning resources and tracking their progress.
Solution
My team iteratively transformed V School's proprietary job search platform into a comprehensive student hub, providing seamless access to essential resources from enrollment through job placement. The redesigned portal earned exceptional user satisfaction, with 84% of students rating it at least 4 out of 5 for effectively connecting them with the tools and resources critical to their success.
Roles
Product designer
Product manager
Team
Product designer
Product manager
2 junior engineers
Education staff
Deliverables
Stakeholder, staff, and student research
Student journey and experience map
Heuristic analysis
User story map
User flows
Sketches
UI Design
Prototype
River Woods - Director of Student Success, V School
A scattered experience made self-starting a challenge for students
When I joined V School, I encountered a digital landscape that resembled a maze more than a learning platform. Students were bouncing between multiple applications just to access basic resources, and each program had its own unique – often contradictory – organization system.
"I never know where to find anything," one student told me during my initial research. To truly understand the problem, I put myself in their shoes, going through the entire student journey from pre-enrollment to registration. This firsthand experience revealed just how scattered our digital resources had become.
Mapping the student journey brought clarity to how and when various tools came into play
To deepen my understanding of the situation at V School and help me figure out a path forward, I spoke with the V School staff members who were involved in the various steps of the student journey from before a student enrolls all the way through program completion.
The key learning from this effort was that students were being given access to different apps, tools, and resources at various times throughout their program. As a result, students had a hard time keeping track of resources given to them earlier in the program and students weren't consistently being given the right access at the right time.
The student journey at a glance
User story mapping set a vision and helped me and my team to iteratively work towards the vision
As I continued to talk to V School staff and students, I learned of a lot of jobs to be done. Those jobs were converted into user stories which were then put into a user story map. This created both a big vision for the ideal solution and also a roadmap that my team and I could use to iteratively build towards.
Mapping out the user stories helped to order and prioritize the work
No-code solutions bought time for a complex transformation
Rather than waiting for a the perfect solution to be built, I took a two-pronged approach. First, I implemented immediate improvements using Notion, our existing documentation tool. This no-code solution helped us quickly:
Standardize program pages across courses
Create clear navigation paths
Consolidate essential resources
But I knew we needed a more comprehensive solution. That's when I spotted an opportunity in an unexpected place: Job Leads Today, an app V School had purchased for job searching. I saw its potential to become something much more valuable than a simple job search tracker.
The new Web Development homepage
After a lot of hard work, the student portal was finally launched
Working with our development team, we transformed Job Leads Today into what we now call V Hub. The new homepage became a gateway to everything students need:
Direct curriculum access
Interactive progress tracking
Program calendars
Resource libraries
The New student portal homepage
Students rated the new portal highly
To ensure that we were on the right right track with the new portal, we implemented a simple two question survey that would appear during a student's first visit. Below you can see the results of that survey.
Feedback survey results
Building on our success
This transformation laid the groundwork for even more exciting improvements. With positive feedback from students we moved on to build direct curriculum access within V Hub, with automated progress tracking that gives both students and staff real-time insight into learning journeys.
Lessons learned
While I learned a lot from staff about the student experience, students were not so easy to learn from. When I reached out to students they were often unresponsive. I was able to learn from a few students, but not nearly as many as would have been ideal. Staff members knew the student experience quite well, but that was no substitute for learning directly from students. If I could go back, I would make a greater effort to find ways to learn from more students.
