Future research
Talk to Guidance CounselorsTo remind students about impending deadlines, a future iteration of our design should include a system that notifies users by email or SMS. Moreover, we would have wish to add more reasoning to how our system would interact with the scholarship application process and FAFSA process given each is a separate system. A feasibility study is necessary to understand if it is possible to incorporate many of are design ideas. For instance, would a guidance counselor have the necessary capacity, time, and energy to review several hundred students’ essays? The guidance counselor’s feedback is an important attribute to our design that needs to be looked at further. Our comparisons page also needs additional refinement to offer comparisons based on certain criteria a person would deem important. As it currently stands, the comparison page is limited to a preset defined set of character traits, though a user can limit search results by specific criteria. Many first-generation students may wish to know the level of debt and tuition assistance that a particular college or university provides when comparing colleges. We also do not fully explain how we see the FAFSA process being simplified besides the addition of a live chat service. Again, we are unsure how incorporating the FAFSA application into our application would be plausible. Quite possibly a high school district could license the product and therefore be able to assist in the process. Usability tests with high school guidance counselors would also be important for future iterations, as they are the number one source of information cited in our survey data (appendix).
Continue to Build Learning Portion
The next steps to continue the development of the College App prototype would be to create more content for the learning portion of the application. The amount of learning topics that could be added is very long, and the more that are included, the more valuable the app will become.
More Participatory Design
Also, the development process would benefit from more rounds of iterative participatory design sessions with the students. They provided many great suggestions, and would continue to do so as the app developed.
Support of Text AdvisingIn order to launch an application like this, two types of structural requirements would have to be met. First, the app offers the feature of real-time text-based advising for students with questions. In order to support this feature, an infrastructure of staff would need to be put in place. Integration with UniversitiesAlso, one of the benefits that this app offers (over collegeboard and the common app) is that students can complete all application materials from within the site. In order to achieve this functionality, agreements would have to be negotiated with universities about the acceptable format for the transfer of submission documents from this site to the universities. The common app only integrates with some universities, and we heard from students over and over that this is the biggest drawback to the common app. This hurdle would have to be crossed for the College App as well before it could be implemented.
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