Sep 2024 - Present
Eli - PM
Kaylie - UX Lead
Vidhi - UI Lead
Michelle - Dev Lead
Max - Dev Lead
TourWay is a self-guided campus tour app designed to help prospective students explore universities through customized tours tailored to their interests, major, and career goals. As part of a 20-week junior design project, I am collaborating with four other UX students to conceptualize, design, and develop this app. TourWay aims to enhance the campus visit experience by providing users with personalized routes and rich multimedia content about key campus locations.
There is a vast difference in each prospective students' interests, career goals, living preferences, and schedules, making traditional campus tours often impersonal and unable to meet individual needs. Furthermore, virtual options lack interactivity, personalization, and essential college information.
Out-of-state and international students have difficulties in attending in-person tours
Tour schedules don't always work for everyone
Students have to follow a fixed route instead of choosing what they want to see
To deepen our understanding of college tours and the admissions process, we conducted secondary research to explore current trends and challenges. Our findings reinforced the importance of creating a personalized, cost-effective campus tour experience that is flexible for both local and international students.
Families spend between $1-3k per college visit, depending on proximity
95% of students find campus tours important in their decision to enroll
There has been an 87% increase in international first-year applications to US schools since 2019-20
We sent out surveys to high school and undergraduate students to gauge their experience with campus tours. Since reaching high schoolers and parents posed some difficulties, there was a second survey sent out to tour guides to get a better understanding of the most commonly asked questions on tour. We got responses from 31 students and 14 college tour guides across various universities.
Top 3 challenges of in-person tours:
Difficulty getting a sense of the community / school spirit / student life
Fixed tour route - no flexibility in choosing what to see / visit
Traveling / commuting to campuses
Top 3 challenges of virtual tours:
Difficulty getting a sense of the community / school spirit / student life
Lack of physical engagement / difficulty gauging distance & scale
Not an accurate/complete representation of the college
To dive deeper into students' experiences with college tours, we interviewed 9 students. Some preferences that students mentioned to improve their tour experience include:
“It's uncomfortable to ask questions when there's a huge group on the tour.”
“I care more about seeing what my personal day to day would look like.”
Based on our research, we put together 4 user personas, making sure to consider specific niches such as the transfer student or the commuter student who may have differing needs when it comes to touring campuses. Below are our 2 general user personas: the prospective student and the parent.
Taking into consideration what students have said about their tour experiences and preferences, we kept in mind a few goals for our web app.
🗒️ Pre-tour questionnaire for student to get a customized tour
⏳ Allow for flexibility of how long they want to spend at each stop, and ability to pause
🖼️ Include various multi-media resources to get a feel for student life and building facilities
While the tour pages for each colleges will have colors specific to that school, Tourway's branding is a simple teal to differentiate from typical college colors.
Based off of a collection of sketches, the team put together low-fidelity wireframes of the main screens in the app to get a general flow. The prototype of this iteration took users through the flow of going through a customized tour.
When conducting usability testing for the low-fidelity screens, we gave each participant the task of creating their own custom tour and going on the tour. Additionally, we asked general questions about their experience with certain features and the app as a whole.