John Carroll University

Carolyn Noll Sorg

Summer is a critical season for higher education enrollment and marketing teams. Intentional planning can be challenging as we plan for the next cycle while wrapping up the current one. Adopting principles from design thinking can turn your meetings into sprints where real progress is made.

Last summer at John Carroll University, we thought like user experience researchers and redesigned our campus visit program. Ten months later, our campus visitor yield rate increased by more than six percentage points and was one of the most critical factors in delivering a record-setting class. Here’s how we did it and how you can replicate our process to solve your most pressing student experience problem this summer.

Pick a framework.

How you frame your project gives you a principled and cohesive set of decision-making rules. Radical hospitality framed our new campus visit and before we met, we did some relevant reading, ranging from New York Times bestsellers to textbook chapters. We came away thinking about hospitality in other industries and in our own Jesuit mission. From this lens, we could ensure that every decision made in the project would be purposeful.

Think about the problem you are trying to solve. What’s been written that might help your team frame the issue authentically and center you with a clear and consistent way of proceeding?

Do your research.

An experience usually goes well when its various aspects match what a person wants to accomplish. But how well do you really understand what motivates your students? In order to intentionally deliver what students are looking for (and, in this case, their parents, too), you have to invite them into the process. Before putting our staff in a room, we ensured they were ready to think about the project like a group of user experience researchers.

In the weeks leading up to a half-day design sprint, we transcribed a focus group discussion with a representative sample of student tour guides, the people on campus closest to the work of the campus visit. We asked them for their observations about student and parent engagement on campus tours. When they were most and least engaged, what were they doing? We called parent visitors and analyzed post-visit survey results. We coded all data, identified key themes and sent a summary to our sprint group in advance so everyone understood how our campus visit was being perceived.

Map it out.

Before the meeting, we drew an experience map of the existing student journey from the first encounter (scheduling on our website) to our last touchpoint (a post-visit follow-up contact).

We plotted each interaction on a horizontal line in chronological order. No activity was too small to include – we mapped out every interaction. We viewed each detail as an opportunity to activate our framework and intervene to help our guests accomplish their goals. Below our timeline, we drew five horizontal lines similar to those of a musician’s staff on a music sheet. The top line represented enthusiasm, the middle - indifference and the bottom frustration. Because of our research, we were ready to think like our prospective families. Under each interaction, we plotted an emotion on the associated line; then, we connected the dots to see where we had opportunities to improve the experience.

“Design thinking transforms planning from routine to purposeful by centering the student experience. When we listen deeply, map emotions and act quickly, we can create meaningful improvements that reflect both our mission and the real needs of our audiences”

Below our emotion graph, we noted what various student personas might be thinking, feeling and doing and what touchpoints (human, physical assets or technology) were involved. Our goal was to understand where current practices diverged from the research findings or our framework and where opportunities for change were most evident.

Here’s an example of how this mapping exercise went: We wrote “finding a parking spot” on our timeline. When the parking spots were full or hard to find, the emotion was frustration. The family may think they’ll be late, feeling lost and scrambling to make an alternative plan. The current assets were Visitor Parking signs and a PDF campus map. This exercise immediately started to illuminate opportunities for better systems and tools to infuse this step of the journey with hospitality and care.

Templates of experience maps are all over the Internet, which can be a beneficial activity for identifying new or overlooked ways to improve an experience. But be careful – experience mapping without first researching or involving your population directly can lead to assumptions and generalizations and cause your project to miss its mark. Remember that everything is context-dependent when designing an experience.

The Design Sprint

After all the pre-work, we dedicated a half day to creating a structured action plan. Our agenda began with 30 minutes of discussing the experience map. We were particularly mindful of identifying where our current experience conflicted with our research findings and fell short of our stated framework of radical hospitality. We then split into groups. One group mapped the achievable path that solved identified problems (given current resources and a 4-month timeline); the other group got to dream with no limits. The groups had 30 minutes to organize and map their new plan. The time was purposefully short to force choices. We came back together and spent the next hour discussing the latest maps and prioritizing the remaining elements, what could be improved and what needed further investigation. We included ideas from each group in the final map, assembled them in a virtual whiteboard and shared them with all.

We continued to offer each other feedback and link project elements as they evolved. Getting in motion helped us complete our project in four months, even with an idea or two activated from the blue-sky thinking group.

Progress Not Perfection

The key to design thinking is to embrace progress over perfection and adopt an iterative mindset. Students, parents, staff and other stakeholders need to interact and react to an experience so that it continues to grow with relevance.

As you’re starting your project, ask yourself what the minimum, most slimmed-down plan is that is big enough to make peoples’ experience meaningfully better but small enough to launch quickly. What opportunities exist to co-create improvements as you track stakeholders’ real-time feedback? Taking an iterative approach will ensure your next project not only meets the needs of students but does it in a way that exceeds their expectations.