Helping a Best-in-Class Ed-Tech Enhance Their Core Digital Platform

IvyWise helps students get into prestigious universities by providing a comprehensive program and best-in-class college counselors who work with families in the years leading up to application. Their myIvyWise product is integral to how counselors and students collaborate, from drafting and revising the perfect admission essays to keeping track of grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.

IvyWise came to us with ideas for new features to add to the platform but also a recognition that their current front-end stack was a burden for its users and their staff.

We started with an information-gathering and planning phase that was four-pronged. It included:

• Functionality and user experience audits of the existing product to document all of its moving parts and identify places that fell short of usability best practices
• A technical audit of their current stack, existing documentation, and development processes in order to understand how the platform worked under the hood
• Stakeholder discussions to better understand the IvyWise team’s current pain points, visions for future functionality, and their business and industry
• User research with parents, students, and internal users to test assumptions, highlight additional pain points, and uncover new opportunities

Through our conversations with their team, we had to account for both short- and long-term efficiencies, including improved technical performance and adding new functionality. With this in mind, we developed a phased feature-by-feature product roadmap for iterative releases that allowed us to intentionally transition from a Rails monolith to a modern Vue frontend that communicated with the Rails app via GraphQL. This plan ensured existing users wouldn’t be disrupted, even as the entire user experience was being rewritten.

The early audits and user research identified several high friction points for users within the platform including unnecessarily dense and complex screens and inconsistent UI patterns. We were able to triage usability improvements to these features before starting the more extensive, gradual overhaul process.

Students and counselors used the product to keep track of the schools a student planned to apply to, as well as their progress on essays, recommendation letters, and application status for each school. However, the interface for managing that information was confusing, overwhelming, and complex.

We collaborated with the IvyWise team to reimagine how this core feature should work across the lifecycle of a student’s engagement with the program. We crafted a new experience that divided one overly complex interface into several simpler ones, added powerful configurability features, and improved overall usability.

One of the net-new features we worked on included a semester-by-semester timeline of how the program prepares students for college applications. Another net-new feature was tasks, which allowed counselors to create and assign tasks to students. Tasks would be associated with time periods on the timeline, giving families a granular view into the future of their engagement with IvyWise.

While similar, each student’s program, timeline, and tasks are unique. To reduce operational overhead for IvyWise, we worked with their team to build a system where they could build timeline templates or archetypes and use those preconfigured archetypes as a starting point for individual students’ timelines. Additionally, we created an inheritance system for tasks, allowing them to develop prototypical root tasks for quick use or further customization.

These features built a high degree of time savings for the IvyWise team in managing content while preserving the highly personalized experience that has made them successful.