Services
Strategy
Human-Centered Strategic Planning
Through an interactive workshop series, we help higher education organizations move from ideas to action. Are you at a critical juncture with your organization? Do you need help facilitating important questions, gathering perspectives, visualizing contexts, prioritizing opportunities, and defining a path forward?
Student Success strategy
Student success is a complex and challenging opportunity space for all institutions. We believe high-impact improvement opportunities come from examining student, faculty and staff experiences holistically:
from the outside-in
across departmental silos
being human-centered.
Through discovery and insights development, we help you design and deliver a winning strategy and solutions roadmap.
Services Strategy
Institutions deliver many services to students, for example, Financial Aid, Onboarding, Advising, etc., that need improvements, such as usability, process, and policy, include a new vendor solution, and are student success-impacting. We believe in the value of design as a discipline to help campuses visualize and understand their strategic service improvement opportunities. We work cross-functionally to reveal core ecosystems (people, policy, process and technology). We work to facilitate and synthesize ideas into long-term solutions where multiple parts of the organization are involved.
Discovery
discovery projects
We help you understand the service experiences of your customers - students, faculty and staff. We use a number of design methods including user research, journey, touchpoint and experience mapping, and service blueprinting to uncover pain-points and opportunities for service improvements. We uncover the needs that your customers can't tell you.
services design
Armed with research and insights, we work with you to design and implement solutions that deliver the highest impact and value for your campus.
Implementation
change management
We know that significant systems changes, like replacing a Student Information System (SIS) or implementing a new Billing and Payments solution, can significantly impact large portions of campus and the many people it serves. Preparing for this kind of change, and projecting the impact on the student experience, can be daunting for the project team. With our knowledge, we work outside-in to map out core student, staff and faculty journeys and to understand the current service experiences. Then, we help you contrast the old and new service experiences for your launch, including roadmaps and the design of change management communications and training content for your customers - critical who, what, why, when and how content.
Usability Assessments
We uncover problems in the design of the product or service, discover opportunities to improve the design and provide important information about the behaviors and preferences of users.
Learning
workshops and training
We help you develop your in-house design capabilities. Topics might include design studio, touchpoint mapping, journey mapping, blueprinting, design thinking, prototyping, improv and service design.
Student Innovation Initiatives
We help campuses take advantage of the interests and talents of their students by organizing hackathons or design workshops to support campus needs, ex: engaging students in designing solutions to raise awareness around Mental Health or to address Food Security.
Many campuses are looking for ways to harness the creativity and problem-solving skills of their students through the formation of a Student Innovation Program. We can help you design a program office to facilitate engagement between student groups and appropriate sponsors and stakeholders.
MEASURING THE IMPACT WORKSHOP
Service improvement changes are often delayed or not undertaken because of the perceived cost, and conducting assessments is not undertaken or an afterthought. We show you how to evaluate the cost/benefit of improving service touchpoints by looking at the anticipated impact to uses of the services or solution, how it aligns with institutional values, plus the initial development and ongoing costs, for example, improved efficiency, greater self-service, higher satisfaction, confidence and trust, etc.