Almost every day we have a flood of prospective students visit our Welcome Center (opens new window) ready to explore campus. Some of these students have signed up for a tour on our website (opens new window), while others just drop in and decide that today is a great day to see campus. We are excited to show off our beautiful campus to anyone who is interested, so we don't turn anyone away.

Our department is in charge of the Web experience for these prospective students and that has been working great. Campus tour signups have increased quite a bit because of our efforts (opens new window). The arrival experience on the other hand needed some attention. With the introduction of the Student Service Center in the Welcome Center, it was a great opportunity to optimize that arrival experience.

On campus experience

We were tasked with created a "Campus Tour Check-In" form that would be set up on a computer as students came in. This form would allow the students to accomplish the following things:

1. Sign up for an upcoming tour that day
2. Find their name and sign in to tell the Admissions staff they were here for their tour

We went to work sketching out what we thought the initial screen would look like.

This is what we came up with:

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For us this made logical sense, one page, two options, the full sign up form ready to take any new submissions and a secondary sign-in form where the student could look up their name.

But something was wrong

After presenting this to some of the tour guides we realized we made some assumptions that were not consistent with how students interact with the tours. The majority of students pre-register for their tour and only a few drop in to take a tour without signing up.

So back to the drawing board. We simplified the page to a single search field, "last name". This forces the student to check to see if they have already registered (avoiding duplicates), if they find themselves they can click the "Check In" button next to their name and are ready to go. If they don't see their name in the list they can click the "Sign Up" button on the right and enter the rest of their information to sign up and sign in for a tour that day. More students than we thought ended up coming to take a tour on a different day than they signed up for, so the search results contain past and future tour registrations.

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Above you will see the sketch of the initial screen (left) and once they type in their last name they are presented with the results (right) so they can decide to check in or sign up for a new tour.

The actual form

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Above you will see what the live form looks like, there have been some graphical changes since the launch that are not reflected here but the user interaction is the same.

It is opportunities like this that get us excited to be able to impact and extend the Web experience to mirror how students actually interact with campus. The more natural we can make the experience the more we can get out of the students way and assist with their task. If we can make the experience "invisible", the student then has time to focus on more important things.