Fixing 5 Years of Drop-Off: Mobile Optimization for a High Stakes RFI Flow

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All Star Directories offers non-traditional students the ability to connect with educational institutions through their legacy Request for Information (RFI) system. It was a desktop experience that had not been successfully updated in over a decade and conversion was waning.

Highlights: Wizard design and mobile optimization strategy focused on meeting customers where they were led to successfully conversion.

Business Goal

Redesign the legacy experience to increase user engagement and conversion

UX/UI Design • Mobile Optimization • Interaction Design

The Legacy Design: Critique and Competitive Review

• 2-column design adding to customer cognitive load when filling out

• Small form fields making it hard to read

• Small text was hard to read

• Repetitive information creating hierarchy problems

Solution: A Streamlined Wizard Flow

To better understand how our competitors were engaging with customers, I did a review of their experience and mapped out the user flows in comparison to All Star's flow.

A responsive design ensuring the layout was optimized for screens of all sizes.

Clear, Conversational prompts: Text was simplified to help customers understand what was needed at each step of the journey, making the experience feel more guided.

Forward Progress Transitions: Smooth transitions between steps to keep users focused on completing the task.

Results and Impact

The Updated Experience

This experience was launched in an A/B test against the legacy experience with the new experience outperforming the legacy with a 7% increase in conversion.

My design was the first successful change made to the legacy experience in over 10 years bringing leadership confidence in the value of data-driven design and in the team's ability to deliver impactful solutions. This led to more leeway to update other parts of the experience that were also underperforming in its legacy state.

Design Goal

• Streamline user flow for improved task completion

• Mobile optimization strategy

Desktop Critique

Mobile Critique

• 1-column design

  • Some forms had a lot of fields, discouraging customers from completion

• Small form fields were not touch-friendly

• Small text was hard to read

• Repetitive information creating hierarchy problems

Experience Critique

I did a visual review of the experience and had new employees walk through the experience as a make shift usability test.

Here are the findings:

Single form submission for every school. A new form was shown to the customer after each submission.

Inspired by our competition and based on the research I did, I introduced a wizard-style flow that broke the form into smaller, more bite-sized steps. The new design focused on progressive disclosure, guiding customers through one question at a time to reduce cognitive overload and make the process more manageable.

Used a streamlined, multi-step process, gathering all necessary information from customers before submitting to schools.

All Star Original Flow

Competitor Flow

Comparing User Flows

I also redesigned the UI to focus on the mobile experience.

• Large-touch friendly buttons and form fields

• Large easy to read-text

• Progress bar to let customers know where they were in the process

• Transition screens in between school forms to provide clear feedback of task completion

Mobile Optimization

• Continuous treadmill experience had customers sending suggested RFIs without realizing it

• Abandonment happened on long forms