Columbia College DC

Custom Digital Platform

Columbia College DC Custom Digital Platform is a unified solution designed for Columbia College that combines the public website, a content management system, and a student/faculty portal into one seamless experience. It streamlines access to academic information, enrollment tools, and administrative workflows, transforming previously complex and disjointed processes into a modern, intuitive platform.

Business Goal

The primary goal of this initiative was to improve student retention and conversion rates by providing a clear, efficient, and user-friendly digital experience that supports prospective students through the enrollment journey. By consolidating multiple outdated or unusable systems into a single point of contact and source of truth, the platform reduces wasted time and budget, increases operational efficiency, and ultimately drives enrollment growth and revenue for the college.

Roles & Contributions

Consultant

UX Strategist – establishing the integration of UX into the development lifecycle, aligning design direction with business goals.

UX Researcher – leading workshops, interviews, and surveys to capture roles, journeys, tools, statuses, and pain points.

Information Architect – auditing, mapping, and restructuring workflows, processes, and content into logical, usable structures.

Product Designer – developing wireframes, prototypes, global components, and refined solutions that streamline user interactions.

Business Analyst – identifying inefficiencies, analyzing requirements, and translating them into clear, actionable deliverables.

Content Strategist – auditing and organizing website/portal content, ensuring clarity, consistency, and usability.

Brand & Identity Designer – creating cohesive brand architecture and visual identity aligned with Columbia College’s ecosystem.

Facilitator & Collaborator – bridging stakeholders, leadership, and development teams to align on goals, priorities, and feasibility.

Technology Partner Contribution

Lead Architect/Engineer – built the custom CMS, portal, and supporting technical infrastructure and architecture.

Hosting & Infrastructure Manager – provides and maintains server hosting, ensuring reliability, security, and performance.

Ongoing Support & Maintenance – manages technical updates, bug fixes, and performance monitoring post-launch.

Challenges

Fragmented systems and processes: Multiple tools and systems within the ecosystem do not communicate effectively. As the product meant to be the source of truth, it lacks a clear strategy for streamlining the device management lifecycle and integrating with downstream tools.

Engineer-focused design: Initially developed by engineers without a user-centered design, resulting in manual and inefficient workflow that contributes to data quality issues.

Low user adoption: Due to usability and data quality challenges, user engagement is minimal, with many relying on workarounds.

UX Research

Objective

Identify key current and potential users of the product.

Analyze the student lifecycle workflow and various departments involved and other tools and systems.

Identify key pain points and areas for improvement.

Methodologies

Workshops
User Interviews
Surveys
Usability Testing

Role-based Persona

Role-based personas were created to focus on functions and responsibilities. Given the variety of job titles, I identified patterns and common tasks across roles.

The result was a set of clear, role-based profiles that aligned with our use cases, ensuring the personas were relevant despite varied job titles. These profiles provided clarity across the organization and guided more efficient user stories, tasks, and overall decision-making.

Journey Map

We captured high-level goals, activities, tools used, and pain points. The device replacement process emerged as the most complex workflow, requiring deeper analysis to understand and address effectively.

Information Architecture

Objective

The information architecture was a critical aspect of this project, given the lack of reliable and well-documented workflows, processes, and logic.

To build a solid foundation from scratch, I focused on mapping, auditing, and analyzing the current state to ensure a data-driven approach, rather than relying on assumptions from stakeholders.

Outcome

By documenting and evaluating the status quo, I was able to uncover inefficiencies, clarify system logic, and provide a comprehensive overview of how information flowed within the system.

This allowed us to make informed decisions that addressed real issues, aligning the architecture with actual user needs and system functionality, rather than just theoretical insights.

User Flow

With the journey map in place, we further explored the flow of each use case, capturing the roles involved, status transitions, tools used, and key data entries at each stage. This detailed mapping provided a clearer understanding of the workflow on a granular level and where bottlenecks or inefficiencies were occurring.