The Story

All three of us were nervous candidates at Olin College’s 2018 Candidates’ Weekend. After having a blast experiencing an Olin-y weekend and arriving on campus the following fall, we realized that we wanted to create something to make Candidates’ Weekend even better. There are a lot of ways that Candidates’ Weekend is truly special: the Design Challenge, model classes, Olin Unfiltered, and more. We didn’t need our product to transform the weekend, but we wanted to make the weekend easier for students and the Admissions Team–and to improve the sustainability of the event (from both a logistical and environmental perspective). So we decided to focus on something easily overlooked - the documents handed out to students during the weekend.

Project Evolution

We started out with a lofty goal: we wanted to create a website that the college could use for all kinds of events hosted at the College, from Candidates’ Weekends to Orientation to Open Houses to the Summer Institute. However, we quickly realized that the high level of modularity needed for this project would be unfeasible considering the scope of our project, so we decided to narrow our scope to focus specifically on Candidates’ Weekends. Candidates’ Weekends are probably the most complicated events hosted at the College, so our product would be most beneficial if designed for those events.

We made a rough prototype of the web app with basic functionality like adding/editing events and adding/editing users, and displaying different schedules for different users. We presented this prototype to the Assistant to the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, the primary user of our product. After testing, we learned that we had been operating on a set of false assumptions that led us to rework some aspects of our product. For example, we had assumed that students wouldn’t want to access information from their Candidates’ Weekend after it had passed. However, communication with the admissions office and current candidates/admitted students made it clear that this was not the case.

Therefore, we adjusted our structure to allow for different versions of an event for multiple weekends. We also presented the prototype to others in our class during a code review, which revealed additional bugs, both on the navigational side and the aesthetic side. After resolving these bugs, we presented a finalized version of the web app to prospective students and the admissions office. Our user testers gave us very positive feedback, telling us that our web app was easier to navigate than Guidebook and more visually appealing.

In the future, we aim to continue to improve the appearance and functionality of the app. This is a project that we hope can actually be deployed and sustained at future Candidates’ Weekends. The success of the app relies on us continuing our user testing and refining the overall design.