Building Peerlift Microscholarships
UX Case Study
This is an in-depth, design-driven look at the process behind pivoting a database for high school opportunities into a marketplace to connect college students with micro-scholarships. I describe the ideation process, building the platform, testing the platform, and the sometimes painful lessons I learned along the way.
Setting the stage
I founded Peerlift in late 2017, a tech nonprofit that connected high school students to resources like scholarships and internships for college.
Peerlift has 175,000 page views, from 43,407 users.
This case study explains the design decisions and progress made from summer 2018 to present.
At the time, we had 27,000 users, 112,000 pageviews, and had raised $30,000. We were just accepted to Fast Forward, the leading accelerator for tech-nonprofits, and were working out of free office space in San Francisco for the summer.
Team
I was fortunate to meet and bring on incredible teammates, who I lived and worked with. I’ve highlighted their main roles here.
Julie Chen: Heavily involved in needfinding process, helped lead marketing post-launch.
Sravya Alla: Heavily involved in needfinding, manage finances and logistics.
Praneeth Alla: Coded the majority of the platform, involved in strategy.
Jerry Registre: Deeply involved in strategy and donor outreach.
Jorge Campos: Led partnerships and helped lead strategy and growth.
Kassen Qian: Helped developed front-end of platform.
Me! As CEO, led design and product, took lead on determining strategy. I’ve been heavily involved in each aspect of building Peerlift, but am usually most passionate when building interesting solutions to real problems.
The problem
The product I had built curated the top national scholarships, summer programs, awards and more, and streamlined the discovery process into a clean UI. High school students really liked Peerlift, and our user numbers were growing — not the sort of hockey stick growth I dreamed of, but growing — and was on pace to continue.
However, by the beginning of summer, we ran into two major roadblocks.
- There was a fixed number of quality opportunities, and student demand was rapidly increasing. Our demand would far exceed supply within months.
- We built Peerlift to help low and middle-income students. I combined our user location data with corresponding household average income using SQL and Tableau, and revealed that the average income for the area users lived in was $70,000. Not exactly our target audience.
We had profiled 350 top opportunities for students, and estimated there were roughly 1000 quality, national opportunities for students open. At 27,000 users, that meant that there were roughly 77 students for each opportunity.
At our rate of growth, that meant that we would actually be creating reverse network effects — the product would become less useful with each user that joined, because competition for these fixed resources would increase.
If we didn’t fix this, we were on a crash course to stagnation and a vast decrease in value.
Goal: identify who Peerlift’s target user should be.
Phase one: design research.
Duration: 2.5 weeks
Scope: Conducted 30+ interviews, did 4 onsite visits to foundations, built 10 prototypes. I led a human-centered needfinding process similar to that taught at Stanford, and supplemented what I learned in school by reading IDEO’s Field Guide to Human Centered Design.
Step one: who are we designing for?
I had questions — a lot of them.
I needed to define our target audience, and narrowed it down to four groups after a brainstorm: high-achieving students, “average” students, guidance counselors, and local scholarship providers. Over that week, we interviewed members of each category: eleven high-achieving students, five “average: students, five guidance counselors, and eight local providers.
Week one goal: gain a strong understanding of the needs of each group, and determine a group to do a deep dive on by end of week.
Here, I’ve grouped my main insights and prototypes from that week.
Group one: Highly motivated students loved national opportunities because they wanted to improve their resumes for college.
Peerlift profiled six categories of opportunities, and I was intentional about expanding beyond scholarships to list summer programs, internships, awards and more.
Highly motivated students loved having access to this information in one place — they had extreme difficulty accessing and discovering these resources otherwise. The opportunities were extremely competitive, but the potential to winning one of these, and winning either 1) a large amount of prestige for college or 2) a large amount of funds, made it worth it.
Group two: Average students were too intimidated by national opportunities to apply.
I defined an average student as a student who mostly received Bs or Cs, and was college-bound, but did not have elite aspirations.
Every time I interviewed a student from that group, they passionately described about how they’d never applied to a national opportunity, and have no intention of doing so. Instead, they wanted local scholarships, and didn’t care about the summer programs or interships that the highly motivated students craved. There was too much competition in national opportunities, the applications were too long, and it felt extremely intimidating, especially for low-income students, to compete with better-resourced peers.
This should have been obvious — but our team was biased. We’d each won at least $25k in national scholarships, went to top schools, and assumed that the problem was simply access to these opportunities, not the inherent competition of the opportunities themselves.
Well, shoot. The data already showed me this, but now I knew why. The Peerlift we built simply wasn’t useful for average students. I reframed the problem to be the following.
How might we expand access to local opportunities for average students?
Group three: Local providers were the only source of scholarships for average students, but students and providers faced extreme friction interacting with each other.
If high school students spoke English, local scholarship providers spoke Swahili. Large gaps in age and comfort with technology meant the following.
Many local providers conducted their entire process on paper. There was often no or minimal online presence, they required paper applications, and conducted most communication over mail.
Prototype: Application dashboard
Ok, everything was on paper. Did it have to be like that though? I set a 30-minute timer before an interview with a local provider, and created a sample application dashboard that simulated what an online interface could look like if these providers took their process online.
Question: How will a local provider react when provided with a visualization of their workflow, online?
Response: Dead silence. After staring at the prototype for 4 minutes, and considering it, the provider told us he didn’t know if he liked it.
Takeaway: There was little motivation to go online for this local provider, and others. This scholarship committee was a group of three retired teachers who met each year to deliberate, and technology introduced unnecessary complexity. Not every local provider fit that profile, but a whole lot did.
At this point, I was curious.
Why did it seem that so many local providers we spoke to and visited fit the profile of low-tech awareness, and were generally older?
Experience prototype: create my own scholarship
What I did: Put on my donor cap, and pretended as if I was a prospective scholarship donor who wanted to create a $1,000 scholarship. The Gorman fund has a nice ring to it anyway.
Learnings:
- It is hard and incredibly confusing to create a scholarship. I spent two hours researching on Google.
- There are Scholarship Management Companies that offer to handle the hosting and student acquisition, but often charge large fees, and only cater to large donors of $5,000+.
I identified an opportunity space: these were two groups that strived to reach each other, but didn’t know how.
Local providers did not care about increasing the number of applicants they received. This also came as a surprise.
Group four: Guidance counselors were gatekeepers who controlled the flow of local opportunities to students, but college planning actually represented a very small part of their lives.
The guidance counselors I interviewed were busy people. In fact, one I spoke with estimated she only spent around 10% of her time on college and career counseling. Sixty percent of her time was spent on administrative tasks, like class scheduling, where she would spend hours making manual class changes by hand. Very few had the time to promote scholarships, although almost all of them wanted to. Here, I recruited extreme users on both ends — private school guidance counselors with vast resources and high expectations, and rural public school counselors in Iowa who served their entire schools of 800.
Every local provider we spoke with viewed the guidance counselor as their entry into a high school, but in reality, these counselors were often too busy to promote these opportunities. The research led me to consider ways to prototype making counselors jobs more efficient.
However, I learned this space was already well-serviced. Driving top-down adoption from schools is a logistical nightmare, and any sort of software for school employees would have to go through months of vetting before approval. Companies like Naviance were emerging as a leader in the college counseling space, and turns out a startup uncovered the same insight on the mass inefficiency of school scheduling, and just raised a Series B to go solve it. Guidance counselors weren’t going to be our target audience.
DECISION: Address the needs of average students.
Opportunity space: Average students are incredibly underserved by the current scholarship process. National opportunities are too competitive, and local providers are often too small and inaccessible.
I reframed our research question for week two to the following.
How might we create the perfect scholarship for average students?
What would an 11/10 scholarship experience be for an average student?
Experience prototype: write an essay
I reached back out to a past interviewee who fit the profile of an average student (we’ll call her Kate), and asked her to write a 500-word essay. In exchange for writing the essay on a Google doc (so we could see version history) and doing a post-experience interview, we gave Kate writing feedback and compensation.
Question: What are the biggest pain points that students face when writing an essay?
! Surprising insight alert!
Kate wrote her essay as if she was talking out loud. The paragraphs were structured like a conversation, except it took a lot more time to finish — 2.5 hours over 3 days.
This led me to question a commonly held assumption: why did scholarship applications need to include essays? Essays are just a way to share who a person is, and what better way to do that then to actually show them, using something like video?
It would be gamechanging if Kate could actually apply to a scholarship as if she was having a conversation by sending an informal video of herself.
Micro-scholarships: things get exciting.
After reaching that insight with Kate, I had an out-there idea. Usually, I like expressing new ideas with short comics, because I can center the idea around the experience of a person sequentially vs thinking too abstractly.
What if you didn’t need thousands of dollars or hours of time to create a scholarship?
With micro-scholarships, anyone can create a scholarship between $100 and $1000 in five minutes. Students would submit short minute-long videos of themselves responding to prompts, and donors would watch and choose directly on the platform.
Decision time: What should Peerlift become?
I’ve only been really excited about ideas a handful of times, and this was one of them for micro-scholarships. The team wasn’t as convinced, and we now had a pivotal decision to make after two weeks of needfinding and prototyping.
Local scholarships vs micro-scholarships
We did a few intensive brainstorms, but the ideas of indexing local scholarships, or creating micro-scholarships stood out as providing the most value for our target audience.
Local scholarships
Pros
This is what everyone in our profile said they wanted. Nothing currently exists that enables users to discover local scholarships near them, and this idea had high potential to 1) expand our audience beyond highly motivated students and 2) make higher education more accessible for these students by connecting them to previously unknown scholarships.
Cons
Indexing every local scholarship ever is…complex. From what I inferred from our UX research, many local providers were offline, so a tech-heavy solution like scraping would leave out a solid core. We could prototype around crowdsourcing from students or guidance counselors, or providing hosting services to local providers to get them to list themselves on Peerlift (think Yelp or TripAdvisor playbook), but there would likely be a disconnect between the providers and the technology.
Micro-scholarships
Pros
Scholarships have only ever been made from the donor’s POV. By making them student-centered, and enabling short, on the go video applications, I could expand the definition of who wins scholarships. Students like Kate could not only get a fair chance, but thrive in this system. On the donor end, now anyone could create a scholarship and give back in a direct way they couldn’t before. In a similar way that Robinhood made stocks accessible to anyone, we could do the same for scholarships.
Cons
Building a two-sided marketplace is likely as difficult as indexing the internet for every local opportunity ever. Our team was heading back to school in two months, and this sort of product demands extreme dedication to succeed. I wasn’t sure if we had that in us, and none of us had prior experience with marketplaces. There were a lot more unknowns with micro-scholarships because of its novelty, but also contained high potential.
DECISION: we chose to further pursue building for micro-scholarships.
- The team was more excited to work on this idea than local opportunities. That’s huge, when you’re only four people.
- The potential upside for the impact this could make on students affording college could be higher, since it actually expands the supply of capital available to students.
We had an idea, but now had to dial in and challenge that idea across a design, business, and technical lense.
Bets
For micro-scholarships to succeed, I collaboratively came up with six bets that needed to be true about the product, ranked from importance. If one of the mission-critical bets turns out wrong, micro-scholarships doesn’t work. I got this idea from Mike Maples, an early investor in Twitter and Lyft, when I snuck into a grad level class of his last Spring.
- [MISSION-CRITICAL] Ordinary people create micro-scholarships between $500 and $1,000
- [MISSION-CRITICAL] Donors will create more than one micro-scholarship.
- Students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds will win on PL
- We’ll meaningfully provide value to users who don’t win.
- We can take 10% from donors at the point of transaction.
- We’ll match 10% supply with demand in a given environment.
Understanding macro-trends
That class with Mike also taught me to consider the broader landscape before prototyping a solution in depth. I considered the following questions when making the decision to shift to micro-scholarships.
1) Do I believe that scholarship money will increase, decrease or remain constant?
2) Do people seek more transparency in their giving?
3). Have recent tech innovations made this possible?
5) Are charitable donations going up down or constant in what ways? To what?
The design process: building micro-scholarships.
I’ve gone in-depth into how I designed the actual micro-scholarships platform in an equally long article here. . I’ve shared a few select screenshots of the platform I designed, and encourage you to explore Peerlift for yourself here.
Learnings:
Leave artificial metrics of success in 2019, and choose a core metric. Number of contributors, page views, number of partnerships, etc are essentially vanity metrics. They sound great, and tell me nothing about the success of the product. Rather, choose a source of truth for what matters. For us, it became dollars in microscholarships processed by Peerlift.
The IDEO / Stanford d.school needfinding approach is a good framework, but isn’t a band-aid solution. Withholding judgement can limit the type of ideas surfaced, and breaks with non-designers, especially in fast-paced start-up environment. One of my teammates was thoroughly sick of interview, synthesize, discuss, repeat, and wanted to take a more data-driven approach. For future UX work, I’m interested in learning to run design sprints and focusing more on feasibility to make collaboration with engineers easier.
Social proof is a deeply powerful driver.
Even when an idea is compelling, if no one else is doing it, its perceived value decays. That’s what I learned the hard way when first promoting microscholarships.
When initially reaching out to donors, I got a good amount of emails like this.
— -
Why? My hypothesis was there was little to no social validation of the product, and users were hesitant to be the first to jump in.
We asked students to apply to scholarships created by close supporters to jumpstart growth, and stitched together a highlight video.
I also added social validation onto our launch page in places like here, with real donor testimonials.
The results are still coming in, but early results seem promising. Go social proof!
That’s it! Hope this case study was insightful for you, and I’m available at sgorman at stanford.edu to keep the conversation going.
