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MID-POINT CHECK-IN

WINTER 2022

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1

Meet the

Team

Stephen Mok

Anne Capelli

Desmond Du

Prajay Suresh

Tiffany Lo

Emily Younie

David Meyers

MFA Visual Effects

Yukun Qian

MFA Motion Media Design

Cattleya Wu

MFA Motion Media Design

Dean Nelson

Ayanna Cooper

BFA Graphic Design

MFA Interactive Game Design

BFA Animation

BFA Sequential Arts

SCADPro Professor

BFA Writing

BFA Sequential Arts

SCADPro Professor

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Our Presenters

3

Stephen Mok

Desmond Du

Tiffany Lo

MFA Visual Effects

Yukun Qian

MFA Motion Media Design

MFA Interactive Game Design

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Agenda

4

Recap�Where we left off

1

Interviews�Primary Research

2

How Might We? & Ideation�Our plans going forward

4

Personas

Humanized User Examples

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Executive Summary

Scope

Problem statement

Proposed solution

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Scope

Work with a product owner and the customer to identify and validate personas, research top tasks, design and execute a paperless solution.

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Problem Statement

In the field of third party payment for educational sponsorship, there are no payment platforms that allow sponsors to manage their employees’ information, navigate multiple school portals, and effortlessly make payments.

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Proposed Solution

To create a payment portal that not only synergises the payment process across multiple platforms, but also acts as a unified hub.

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Interview Insights 1 — Students

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Questions for Student

Student: Miah Freeman

“Can you walk us through your payment process?”

“Do you have any trouble finding any particular information in the current portal?”

“Is there anything that slows or frustrates you when you’re making a payment to a school?”

“Who keeps track of your payments and finances?”

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Insighting & Theming — Students

Help is hard to reach, inaccurate and not timely

Different contractual clauses complicate sponsor processes

Notifications and communication are unreliable and complicated

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YQ We gathered many data points from interviewing and observing sponsored students. With the use of an affinity diagram, our teams are one step closer to synthesizing qualitative data — from multiple sources — into one, actionable visual.

We generated 14 themes, and narrowed them down to three points where we think can potentially contribute a lot to sponsor experience.

Our first Insight from these three points is that help and support is hard to reach,inaccurate and not timely. We’ve noticed that many students did not know how to contact support; there is no clear help option visible. Even after reaching support, their replies are slow, because most of the responses were done through e-mail, it is not a efficient way for problem shooting. Most students can’t clarify their problem, which cause back and forth conversation wasting time.

Our next Insight that for, there are many different terms and conditions that the sponsee has to manage and implement into the portal. There is no unify sponsorship process for student to refer.For example, some sponsor would give a fixed amount of money at a fixed time period, while another would cover both tuition and insurance, while another would co-pay tuition with students. This is further complicated by those who are international students because they have to worry about exchange rates, etc… To summarise, different sponsees have to manage different types of sponsorship agreement with little to no guidance, so it complicates their sponsorship process.

Our third and final Insight is that communication is difficult. Some sponsees are worried about not receiving reminders from their sponsors when they make a payment, others feel overwhelmed with so many emails they get. Some don’t even check them. For international students, they need more time to prepare the money.They need notification in advanced and more frequently. At the end of the day, we can’t please everyone, but we want to streamline this process to the best of our ability for a smooth sponsorship process.

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Name

Miah is a Freshman in college who is studying in America and is originally from Australia.

She has been sponsored but still has to pay a bit out of pocket.

Age Classification

Year

18

International

Freshman

Miah Freeman�Student

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Quotes

“I don’t know what to do at first time on the payment portal”

“I feel helpless, when I cannot find the channel or contract to troubleshoot the problem I met”

“I always miss the notification or didn’t see them on time.”

Miah Freeman

Student

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Pain Points�Students

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Missing or not receiving the notification in time causes the sponsor

to fail to remit money

There is no clear guidance when first time access the portal

Hard to contact sponsor for troubleshooting

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How Might We Statements�Students

How might we…

Guide students in setting up and maintaining sponsorship so they would feel confident the first time they make a payment?

How might we…

Provide a quick, accurate and easy access troubleshooting service with timely communication and effective notification?

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Interview Insights 2 — School

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Questions for School

School: Hannah Phillips

“Which payment portal provider does your university / college use?”

“How would a new sponsor go about setting up third-party payment with the school?”

“Does your school enroll any international students?”

“What frustrations do you have with the current system?”

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Insighting & Theming — School

Poor visual language is a common complaint

Portal asks more information than needed

Being able to a conditional search helps locate data

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School is the main client for ACI, so we definitely have to learn their experience and how they use the payment portal.

In our research, we figured that the database system, Banner, is what most school is using. It's like an ERP system I'm sure you know more. For SCAD as an example, SCAD uses touchnet, but they're not using the sponsor portal from Touchnet, why?

they think visual language is somehow really complex. By visual language, we mean the meaning of the buttons are sometimes unclear to some of the employees. As an employee that has to deal with it everyday, they get used to it. However, it could be designed better.
Secondly, when dealing with the portal, sometimes it redirects too much, and there are simply too many information the staff needs to enter manually.
The third insight was the most popular one among schools, when dealing with database system, they'd like to have a filter function to filter whatever information they need, but also have a clean look.

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Name

Age Classification

Role

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Local

Head of Finance

Hannah works at Grove University as the Head of Finance.

The finance department processes hundreds of payments per day.

Hannah needs a reliable portal that will house all financial student and sponsor information that can be accessed and transferred at any time.

Hannah Philips�Grove University - School

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Quotes

“It’s such a hassle when we have to transfer data from one database to another.”

“I wish we could choose what information to see.”

“The process for international students is always more complicated.”

Hannah Phillips

School

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Pain Points�School

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No dedicated system for third-party payments

The cost of implementing a new system does not outweigh the work saved

The current system is rife with human errors on data input

The billing process involves too many pages and clicks

By no dedicated system, we mean that in order for school to have the motivation to apply the third party payment portal, it has to be easy and automated. One of the reasons why school is reluctant to use it is because they cannot automatically upload the existing data from "Banner" to sponsor portal.
The cost is not only the monetary cost, but also the cost of time. It takes around 6 months for school to integrate a portal to the system, therefore, for school, it seems to be a big commitment to dive in.
We are also figuring out that most of the error is not from the system, but from the human error, within school, or made by student and sponsor.
For a school, 60 % of the sponsor are using electronic payment method, while 40% or them are using checks, and for general students, 70% of them are using electronic payment and 30% are using traditional banking method. For those who are still using the traditional ones, it involves a lot of data searching for the schools to find certain person.

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How Might We Statements�Schools

How might we…

Allow schools to manage a financial database in a customizable way unique to their workflow and process?

How might we…

Develop an affordable solution for schools to automate their accounting workflow so they can make their process more efficient?

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Interview Insights 3 — Sponsor

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Questions for Sponsor

Sponsor: Ben Finkelstein

“Can you walk me through the average sponsor billing process?”

“How many sponsees do you manage currently, and how many schools do you typically have to manage?”

“What is the easiest and hardest part of the process?”

“Is there any information or documentation from the sponsee that you require to be given?”

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Insighting & Theming — Sponsor

Administrative process is too tedious to handle internally

Misinterpretation of sponsorship guidelines are common

Fees of third-party service is based on employee usage

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In the synthesis of our findings, we discovered that several insights

We were amazed to find out that they outsourced the job to a third-party called fiducious who takes care of administrative work as they weren’t as informed in the field. This was something they done internally in the beginning, but they did not want to be involve as they realized tediousness of the work.They do not interact with any portal of any kind, and how they receive notifications of reimbursement approval and breakdown of expenses from benefit program through emails from Fiducius.
Fiducius was the middleman doing the communicating with the employees. There was still the problem of communicating to employees to how to use the platform because there were misinterpretation of the legal guidelines to adhere to tax and federal regulations. The sponsors would have to clarify this with the employee or work the Fidicious to override some part of the process to expedite the payment process.
Usage of this 3rd party service is based on the number of employees usage. For a small benefit program, it might be an affordable choice, but when it is scaled up, it might prove to a huge expense

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Name

As the Head of Benefits at Roko Logistics, Ben oversees hundreds of employees.

Roko Logistics supports furthering education and wants to incorporate a tuition assistance program for their employees who would like to enroll in an educational program.

Age Classification

Role

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Local

Head of Benefits

Ben Finkelstein�Roko Logistics - Sponsor

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Quotes

“We don’t have a lot of people, but the verification process is tedious.”

“There is a whole approval process between the employee and the school.”

“It would be nice to provide information without revealing others.”

Ben Finkelstein

Head of Benefit

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Pain Points�Sponsor

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The administrative part of sponsorship process is too tedious

Huge volume of employee data to work and communicate with

Steep learning curves for different payment portal

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How Might We Statements�Sponsors

How might we…

Create a space where students can

connect directly with their sponsors?

How might we…

Develop a more unified solution for sponsors

to manage and track their student sponsorship?

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Personas

Ben Finkelstein

Head of Benefits, Roko Logistics

Hannah Philips

Head of Finance, Grove University

Miah Freeman

International Student

Personas

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What’s Next?

Upcoming

Finalize wireframing
Prototyping
Supplementary interview
User testing
Coding and development of functional prototype

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Sponsor

Portal

Concept Sketches

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Portal

Concept

Pain point addressed:

There is no clear guidance when first time access the portal

Pain point addressed:

Huge volume of employee data to work and communicate with

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Sponsor

Portal

Concept

Pain point addressed:

Hard to contact sponsor for troubleshooting

Sponsor portal interface

If you noticed on the top right side on the menu bar, we have a mail icon that leads to a page that houses all the help request from the employees
THIS IS TO ADDRESS THE PAINPOINT of being hard to contact sponsor contact.
In this page the sponsor can see who sent the request, subject, description,
ability to reply in the text box
Grey box serves as visual aid in the form of icon that help sponsor instantly recognize the problem without having read all the text - — visual catalog

payment methods
error in system
Guidelines clarification

—--

Potential questions:

big grey square is show the step where the the student send help request. This will help sponsor more understand the problem easier. Because words is abstract. so the problem describe by words sometime is not easy to understand

Sponsor can quick rely the question in chat box below.

Yukun notes：

The sponsee can request help through ‘help button’ at any step of payment process. The system will send sponsee’s question with the step they currently in. Because sometime words is abstract,

if the question can come with when and where it happens, which will help sponsor understand question easier and answer it more accurately.

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Sponsor

Portal

Concept

Pain point addressed:

There is no clear guidance when first time access the portal

Another component of our solution include being able to onboard employees with the process of education sponsorship.

This allows sponsors to customize their own company guidelines,
Help sponsees understand uniques policies & requirements
Monitor the which part of the process the employee is on.
Provide the necessary resources at a timely manner for employees to troubleshoot themselves, as opposed to receiving all information at once and being overloaded
*Save sponsor time from explaining employees the process

Sponsee don’t know anything when they first log in the portal.if they try to ask sponsor a bunch of question, it will be very time consuming.
Considerations

No restrictions on portal usage even if they do not read the guidelines
Considerations: avoid enforcing the students having to read

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Student

Portal

Concept

Pain point addressed:

There is no clear guidance when first time access the portal

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Portal

Concept

Pain point addressed:

Missing or not receiving the notification in time causes the sponsor to fail to remit money in time

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Hub

Concept

Pain point addressed:

The administrative part of sponsorship process is too tedious

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Hub

Mid-

Fidelity

Concept

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Website Coding

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Website

Coding

Class selector selects elements with a specific class attribute

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Custom

Style Sheet

Close-up

Algorithm

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Website

Coding

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Summary

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Takeaways

A common problem of navigating the portal with ease and clarity is due to poor layout of information or lack of guidance.
Students have difficulty communicating with sponsors for troubleshooting or clarification as there is no dedicated platform for third-party payment.
Both sponsors and schools manages a huge volume of data, hence the user experience of the site should be succinct to avoid cognitive overload or human errors.

How Might We

Increase the transparency and communication between different parties (personas)

regarding the sponsorship process?

Our proposed solution

To create a payment portal that not only synergises the payment process across multiple platforms, but also acts as a unified hub.

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THANK YOU!

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How Might We?

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How Might We

increase the transparency and communication between different parties (personas) regarding the sponsorship process?

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Journey map

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Ideation

Feature name

Brief description of feature

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Journey Mapping Part 1 Administrative

Benefit eligibility

Employees must fulfil several conditions before being eligible for tuition sponsorship or reimbursement

Communication of eligibility & guidelines

Employees must be informed they are eligible, and be given the guidelines to get started with the process

Approval by managers

Employees need to make a request of benefit to manager

Verification of school & course

Sponsors need to verify if the school is accredited and and also if the course enrolled in relevant to the scope of business

Enrollment into school

Student also need apply enrol in the school

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Insighting & Theming — Students

Expectations of

comprehensive functionality

Recurring payment methods should be available

International payments involves a long intricate process

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Journey Mapping Part 2 Payment process

Payment via portal

Mode 1: Students pays first

Employees pay for their course, and receive a reimbursement upon completion of course and fulfilling requirements (grades)

Mode 2: Sponsors pay school

Sponsors pay tuition or funds directly to school

Example: VA Benefits & GI Bill, bank loans

Student sends documentation for reimbursement

Employee needs to send course payment statement/invoice and grades for verification

Verification and approval

Sponsors review the documents and authorizes the reimbursement

Students get reimbursed

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Jaclyn Smith

Colonial Group, Inc.

Director of Payroll & Benefits

“Reimbursement process is relatively easy in the sense that once it's approved they let me know and then I let our payroll team know exactly how much they need to be reimbursed for and that gets taken care of pretty quickly.”

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[On working with third-party vendor, Fiducius]

“When I think they'll benefit to the arrangement is that we don't have to be involved in the administration. Fidicius manage that daily aspects of it and the paperwork and all that, and so we don't have to be involved in any about it. We just have to pay for it basically.”

Jaclyn Smith

Colonial Group, Inc.

Director of Payroll & Benefits

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Journey Mapping Part 3 Accounting & cashflow

Payment via portal

Schools & sponsors runs financial report

Businesses need to perform analysis, auditing of cashflow by managing a huge volume of data

Routine Reports

& Reconciliation

Data Visualization

Charts & graphs

Data organization:

Filter, formatting, exporting

Mode 1: Students pays first

Mode 2: Sponsors pay school

Analysis & forecast

Business uses this data to monitor expenditures, cashflow for investment opportunities

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Question: Is there any feature that you wish that could help you do your job better?

“I don't think in terms of the payment system that there'd be anything that would necessarily make my job easier right…”

“I think it's more of an internal thing (accounting)...universities can have like treasury system, so you would have that and it would be able to take that cash inflow outflow data and maybe do more projections that aren't so manual.”

Veronica Holland

American University

Associate Director, Treasury Operations

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Question: Is there any feature that you wish that could help you do your job better?

“I don't think in terms of the payment system that there'd be anything that would necessarily make my job easier right…”

“I think it's more of an internal thing (accounting)...universities can have like treasury system, so you would have that and it would be able to take that cash inflow outflow data and maybe do more projections that aren't so manual.”

Veronica Holland

American University

Associate Director, Treasury Operations

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Name

Miah Freeman�Student

Meet Miah Freeman. Miah is a Freshman in college who is studying in America and is originally from Australia. She has been awarded grants and scholarships but still has to pay a bit out of pocket.

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Miah Freeman

Age

Personas

Classification

Year

18

International

Freshman

Pain Points

Too many steps
Unsure of how to fully utilize the platform
Too much paperwork for international transfers
Lack of financial literacy

Motivations

Logic
Intuitive
Easy
Quick

Meet Miah Freeman. Miah is a Freshman in college who is studying in America and is originally from Australia. She has been awarded grants and scholarships but still has to pay a bit out of pocket.

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graphic thingies

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Question Development

Interviews

Gather insights from secondary research

Drafted questions from data points

Filter and refine questions

Create question bible

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Sourcing and Conducting Interviews

Interviews

Reached out to friends and acquaintances

Received assistance from ACI and SCAD

Conduct interviews on Zoom

Transcribe and aggregate

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Primary Research Process

Methodology

Interview three participants for each category.

Define three types of personas.

Reference 906 data points.

Affinitization &

HMW.

Begin ideation for solution.

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Business Model

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Services

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Costs

Apparently we had reached a great height in the atmosphere, for the sky was.

Products

Looking down into the dark gulf below, I could see a ruddy light streaming through a rift.

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Who choose us?

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low bounce rates

By the same illusion which lifts the horizon of the sea to the level.

High Google rank

By the same illusion which lifts the horizon of the sea to the level.

Direct conversion

By the same illusion which lifts the horizon of the sea to the level.

Cloud Services

By the same illusion which lifts the horizon of the sea to the level

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Templates from Desmond

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Company Overview

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We knew it, we had left �the ground.

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MISSION

Before we knew it, we had �left the ground.

Apparently we had reached a great height in the atmosphere, for the sky was a dead black, and the stars had ceased to twinkle.

By the same illusion which lifts the horizon of the sea.

VISION

Almost before we knew it, we had left the ground.

Apparently we had reached a great height in the atmosphere, for the sky was a dead black, and the stars had ceased to twinkle. By the same illusion which lifts the horizon �of the sea.

VALUE

PITCH DECK

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What we do

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Development �Projects

There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available.

Products & �Services

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Learning & Development

Lorem Ipsum there are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum.

Knowledge & �Skills

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The Problem

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Your title Here

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Your title Here

Apparently we had reached a great height in the atmosphere, for the sky was.

Your title Here

We had reached a great height in the atmosphere, for the sky was a dead black.

PITCH DECK

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Presentation preparation guidelines

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Checklist

One message per slide
Images + bullet points > sentences.
Use size to your advantage.
Contrast is important.
6 items is the maximum you can have in one slide.

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Worflow

Graphic Designers build slide templates
Leads create script
Graphic Design provide visual aids, design proofing
Copy — check for errors, truncate words

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Feedback

Content

Begin with the brief/executive summary
Add the “Meet the team” slides
Avoid presenting process, and get more into the takeaway
Breakdown long slides into 3
Sequence of personas segment(qns, findings)
Truncate or shorter points
End each segment with a summary or takeaway
Breakdown and embellish the ideation segment

How it relates to the project
How it implements the research

End with a slide that summarizes the presentation

Design

Visual aids

Personas illustration — use photos
Iconography to illustrate points
Storyboard journey map

Refine ideation sketches
Organization of bullet points
Proofing

Capitalization
Punctuation
Animation
Cognitive overload

Presentation

Considerations for hybrid presentation

no script reading
configuration
Physical engagements

not moving around or swivel chair

Host energy