Unde Studiem

Problem Identification

Our story goes as the following: Before joining the course, we built up our team and discussed a way to identify problems in the current society. We all shared the ones identified by each (you can find some below), but because we were not sure if those were identifiable with others, we decided to conduct the following survey

We delivered the survey between October 5th and 18th, 2020 to some key acquaintances of ours, in order to find current problems or needs in the society, with the specification of letting the respondents know that we can only solve a problem with and through technology. We received 28 responses, from people aged 16 - 28 years old. Among them, there were 62.1% female persons. Thirteen of the respondents came from the IT field, 4 from the medical field, 2 from the economical field, 1 KBO specialist, 1 person from the architectural field - all being students and/or employees - and 8 high schoolers.

This survey helped us identify lots of problems people face more or less everyday in this contemporary world. We had to sort and evaluate not only which can actually be solved by technology, but which are in our scope as well. A great deal of them were focused on getting someone in touch with something. Helping people find things, places, other people and information. In a word, they targeted communities based on interests, occupations and needs.

We chose to tackle a particular problem that we have met in the recent years of our lives: the horrendous process of gathering information about universities before applying. A problem many people have been acquainted with is the state of chaos most of the university websites in Romania are. Distributed information across multiple platforms, most of the time outdated, and no clear indication of its validity had stressed many generations of freshmen in the last decade.

Our team tried to find a simple solution to this problem: centralize the information. A single website that can help future students streamline planning for the future of their education. This can be achieved through standardization of the application process. Breaking the whole thing into simple steps, short and clear, will help everyone to better visualize what they need to do.

Problem Validation

The main objective of this stage in our process was to identify how many people had experienced the problem we try to solutionate. The main concern of this step was to get a clear percent of people who can relate to this struggle, in order to get at least some insights on the nature of this market.

For this step, instead of simply considering everyone as our client, we target two important groups: people that have (recently) or will have to choose and apply to a university (in the near future) and people that are employed and active in a teaching position. First group represents clients, while the second group are possible collaborators.

While most of the questions had choice options, there were also some that required an uninfluenced answer. The purpose of those questions was not to quantify and validate our hypothesis, but to gain additional information about the needs our solution will have to meet in order to offer our clients the promised value.

For the first survey, we had 173 respondents, aged preponderantly between 19-24 years old (61.8%), 16.8% between 14-18 years old, and the rest above the age of 25. Most of them were females (77.5%). Most of them do use internet platforms to get informed about universities procedures regularly - aprox. 50% of the respondents. They trust in a high proportion the official information, rather than Facebook groups or existent forums. However, they are interested in reading and listening to reviews from others in proportion of 79.2%, but they offer reviews in both ways in proportion of 30.1%. This explains the need of human interaction that happens at university fairs, for example, where the information exchanged is trustworthy in high proportions by 97 of our respondents.

The second survey was directed to university and schools staff - teachers, professors, assistants, pro-deans, external collaborators and so on. It gained 16 responses, mostly from male university staff, aged between 20 and 55 years old.

They would assume similar problems of their applicants as the actual applicants sustain: the lack of information about the enrollment process and of the admission process, the lack of information about the actual implications of the university in place, a lot of paperwork involved etc. Therefore, they assume in proportion of above 65% that applicants are not quite well informed when applying for higher education. Moreover, the main sources of information are believed as: friends and acquaintances (56.3%), official websites (56.3%), university fairs (56.3%), comparison among universities websites as well as parents and relatives (43.8%).

Solution Validation Plan

At this point, we have a somehow clear image of what the problem is and which are the needs of our possible clients. In this situation, we come with a solution. But before making any move, this is the last chance to make radical changes to our plans with minimal costs. So we have to validate that what we plan to build is indeed a solution for our clients as well. For this survey, we asked concrete questions about our proposed solution, focusing on gathering feedback from a greater diversity of people. After all, even if our solution has a clear target group, we have to prove it to parents, friends and more, in order to win trust.

Our last survey gained a total of 64 responses from people aged between 19-24 years old (68.8%), 25-35 (14.1%), 14-18 (12.5%) and 35-60 years old (4.7%), mostly women (67.2%). Our respondents are quite regular virtual users, sustaining they have spent time on online platforms regularly within the week when they applied for higher education. Therefore, they would spend a deal lot of time on a trustworthy, efficient and proved-useful one page of information as our platform proposes. A number of 42 of them would contribute with reviews on the platform, while only 5 of them said they would not publish anything. The decision making process is thought of being influenced by the information in the platform for a great deal of them in different measures.

Follow Up

The conclusions extracted from the said validation surveys were predominantly in our solution’s favor. Both targeted groups find the lack of a clear, centralized and well-structured source of information a real problem for future students. As more time needs to be invested in learning the bare minimum needed to apply, candidates have less time and energy to prepare themselves for exams and to better evaluate their options. When the question “How do I apply?” takes more time, naturally, the question “Where should I apply?” will have to be answered faster, but not necessarily better.

We have somehow anticipated this behavior, so we added in all of the validation surveys an optional question translated as: “Would you be willing to give us your contact details (name, email, phone number)?”. We explained below the question that in the eventuality of a product release or of a newsletter that we would love to share with our audience, they would be the first ones we would reach. Therefore, we somehow succeeded in building our first database of future customers and possibly collaborations.

Moreover, two other optional questions were added in the surveys: “If you believe we’ve missed to ask you anything, please write it down here” and “Other suggestions or observations”. Not only did their insights contribute to our conclusions from one survey to the other, but also to our internal thought process of the entire project. They helped us shape the image of the product we want to deliver merged with the one they want to have.

Having validated both our hypothesis and proposed solution, the team is now ready to delve into more product oriented questions. Despite having confirmed our ideas at this stage, the validation process is far from over. Each future step and decision will need additional time and effort in order to be certain of its value.

Wireframes

Student can access the list of universities study programs by going through the following steps

The university page contains a list of structured information regarding the admission, main courses, student life, student statistics and feedback from former students.

Landing Page

The landing page of the application here