Registering as a Kiron Campus student

“The Kiron Campus is an educational platform for refugees so they can study online courses based on OERs (Open Educational Resources) and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in order to access the higher education system or the job market.“

 The Problem

The registration to the Kiron Campus presents a few issues that need to be considered when building it, issues that come from the same constraint: Kiron Campus is currently only for refugees and other forcibly displaced people.

This means that the following needs to be addressed:

• Prospective students need to documents papers that verify their status as a refugee, internally displaced person (IDP), member of a disadvantaged community, etc.

• Those documents need to be verified by someone

• Not all prospective students have email addresses

Presenting documents

Because of the situation in which they left their countries, and the arduous way they’ve followed afterwards, refugees don’t always have access to all of their documents. In Kiron, we accept different types of documents in addition to the refugee accreditation, so that needs to be communicated to the prospective student in a clear and simple way. Because of the language barrier and other concerns, we have to allow students to reupload a document or to reapply easily.

Verification of documents

The problem presented here is that due to the amount of applications received and the lack of a dedicated position to just check them, the documents take a little long to verify, and the prospective student has to wait to be accepted. One of the reasons students tell us why they like Kiron so much is that it gives them the possibility to say that they are a student, not a refugee. This change in mentality is crucial to us. Refugee life is already very hard in the camps (opens in new tab), so any hope that we can give them is precious.

This means that we want prospective students to feel a part of the Kiron community right away.

Lack of email address

Many of our prospective students don’t have an email address, so we need to give them an alternative way to sign up to Kiron. Even if they have an email address, they might not want to use it to register with Kiron due to problems with a government or other issues.

Because of our interviews with students and thanks to questions in the Kiron Help Center, we know that most of them have a mobile phone. Allowing them to apply and log in with their phone number could be a solution that targets most of Kiron’s target group.

How we tackled the problem

I worked alongside the product manager (PM) who was in charge of this part of the product, and with a team that comprised student services experts who gave support to existing students, an engineer, a scrum master, a designer and colleagues who created content and checked documents. My approach to the problem was to work with the PM to understand our previous flow, which raised the problems above. The knowledge provided by the colleagues who checked documents and were in contact with students was very valuable, and their idea to ask our colleagues in Jordan who have direct contact with refugees in camps was fantastic.

Once we had gathered all this information, I quickly sketched a flow and a few screens that I presented to the team. This revealed a few key insights that we had overlooked (for example, there was no way of asking for an SMS with a verification code to be sent again). We discovered a new issue in the process as well.

The location problem

I mentioned before that some students face problems with certain governments, and could be in risk of imprisonment or worse if they were found. This is why a lot of our students are reticent to be taken in pictures, to share their information with us, etc. which makes us extremely cautious with their data. We want to collect as little information as possible, and tell the future student what we are using the information for. In this particular case, we collect the country where they live because Kiron offers different services depending on the country. We ask for the city as an optional piece of information, it’s good to know the city because then we can help them get in touch with other students and build a community, for example, but we understand that it has to be optional in case the student doesn’t want to share that information.
NOTE: That carefulness with student data means that all student information in my designs is 100% fictional.

A quick note on gender

Kiron wants to empower women and give them useful courses and programs. However, we understand that there are individuals who don’t identify as male or female, and we’re not comfortable using the term “other”. In this registration there’s no question about gender, and while it’s part of the profile, it’s not mandatory. The desire to know how many women use Kiron Campus can’t come before the individual’s right to self-identify, but we haven’t yet found a satisfactory solution.

After we decided on what things needed to be fixed, addressed or expanded on, it was time to create the prototype and hand it in to the designer and the engineer.

The solution

In the first screen I give the prospective student the option to register with their email or their phone number, and a link to the login screen in case they arrived to the registration while already being a registered student. Once they choose, they are directed to the specific flow of registration.

Registration with your email address

This flow consists of three screens: one to enter your email address, one that informs you that we sent you an activation link in an email with the option to resend the email if you can’t find it, and a screen that informs you that we resent the email to the address you entered (in case you had made a mistake).

In this case there’s no verify button because the verification link is in the email we sent.
The choice to have a link sent to the email, and not a code that could be pasted in a verification field was made because of the functionality that was already there.

Registration with your phone number

This flow has only two screens: the first screen asks for your phone number and the second screen asks for the verification code we sent you by SMS, with an option to resend the SMS in case it never arrived.

This flow does have a verify button that takes you forward in the process, as it’s only introducing a code in a text field.

Documents and verification

The challenge here was to inform the prospective student about the documents that they can send us to be eligible for Kiron, to ease the waiting process by making the student already feel part of the Kiron community, and to allow the student to reupload the document or reapply.

The first challenge I tackled by a short and informative paragraph that a colleague and I wrote, and a link that takes the student to a content-heavy page with examples of valid documents. That page isn’t here, but it was a scroll down list with images of documents that can be made fullscreen, so the student could compare their own documents to the example.

The third challenge we decided to not tackle in the application process. Every applicant will have access to a limited Kiron Campus until their document is verified, and if they aren’t accepted, there will be a screen in Campus where they are informed about the reasons and will be allowed to reupload a document or reapply.

Feel part of Kiron by filling in your profile while you await verification

That is how I chose to tackle the second challenge. By allowing the student to already fill some information in their profile we can make them feel accepted into the community. This of course presents the challenge of what to do with those students who aren’t accepted, but that was tackled in the Kiron Campus.

This flow consists of five screens. In the first one we tell you why we present you with this option and you can decide to skip it. If you decide to go forward with the profile, then you have to choose a country. A short paragraph informs you why we need that information. If you decide to skip it, then you’d be placed in an “international student” class and miss out on country-specific functionality.

After that step, we ask you for the city you live in, but I wanted to make it super clear that this information is optional, reassuring the student that we’re okay if they don’t want to share. The last step is to ask for your name.

Finally, the last screen shows the information you entered into your profile, and allows you to restart the process.

You’re done!

A congratulatory screen welcomes you into the Kiron Campus, allowing you to log into the Campus already with your credentials.
Something that was unclear in this flow and is hence not shown, is choosing a password. When I exported these designs we were still deciding between giving the student the option to choose a password upon logging in for the first time and creating a dedicated screen to ask for a password.

The Roastery and final steps

The Roastery is a design critique (a design roast) I organized and facilitated, that included other designers and a few stakeholders. The designers (including myself) were a fixed set of people, but the stakeholders changed every week depending on the designs that we’d critizice in the meeting. In this case, people who were involved in the registration process (document checkers, student services, etc.) and the Product Owner (PO) attended.

The flow and screens above were reviewed in The Roastery a couple of times, once in the middle of the design process (where we discovered some issues as I mentioned before, but also approved the general flow), and once again at the end, before handing it to the designer and engineer.

The designs were approved by The Roastery, so I sat with the designer and the engineer to talk about the approach to translate this flow and ideas into a product that our applicants would enjoy, one that wouldn’t be confusing to them, and one that would improve our numbers of registered students and decrease the problems that we had been having with students being confused about which document to send.

After implementation we verified that those two objectives were achieved!
The Kiron Campus saw a higher number of students and the student support team saw a decrease in questions related to the application process.