Prime Digital Academy
Prime Digital Academy
An immersive bootcamp to foster tech talent in minnesota
The Challenge
We were asked to create a design strategy to enable prospective students to better self-assess whether or not the workload, curriculum, and environment at Prime would be a good fit for them. This would help reduce the likelihood of people dropping out partway through the program.
The Process
Research the problem space
Devise a design strategy
Brainstorm new concepts
Present our findings to the client
The Solution
Our proposal included an array of ideas that tied into our established goal of leveraging current and former student experiences, ranging from student stories on the website to videos showcasing aspects of Prime.
Research
We began by researching Prime Digital Academy and other coding bootcamps to get a better sense of the problem space we were going to be operating within. This information led us to discover that Prime's dropout rate was significantly lower than any competitors, a fact that made us look at whether we should instead be focusing on bringing more students in who might otherwise self-assess themselves out.
Strategic Goal
Our conclusion was that the biggest difference between Prime and similar programs was that Prime provided a better sense of support and community between the staff, current students, and even the alumni long past graduation. We were then able to establish our overarching strategic goal of emphasizing the community at Prime by providing prospective students with ways to relate to and become a part of it.
Ideation & Concepting
Brainstorming ways to implement that strategy resulted in the idea to showcase the experiences of students before, during, and after Prime. We also gauged how much work would be required for each suggestion, rated on a scale of immediate implementation, short-term, and long-term.
Concepts for how we can leverage the experience of students to emphasize community
An immediate solution was to create a Slack channel where prospective students could ask alumni and current students questions about their experiences directly. Tying back into our overarching goal, this would provide a chance to form connections with the community before starting the program.
Sample word cloud providing points of relation for prospective students
We were able to devise numerous suggestions with a short-term implementation. Among these were some modifications to the current website that would show some stories of the backgrounds of Prime alumni so that prospective students would find a personal connection to their own experiences. We also proposed an increased social media presence by having the staff post pictures of some moments of the daily life at Prime; this would aid prospective students by both allowing them to get to know the staff and also glimpse what might await them.
Our long-term ideas continue off of the idea of displaying daily life. In this case, it would take the form of a video following a small number of current students throughout their average day, from morning until night. With an array of different living situations and commutes, prospective students would be able to see somebody whose experience they can relate to, all while showing how each of those individuals interact with the broader Prime community.
Timeline showing a prospective student's journey with their emotions, incorporating our suggested tools to help them along the way
Client Presentation
Finally, we presented all of these ideas to the clients at Prime Digital Academy and then answered their questions afterwards. These questions were a great experience that allowed our team to more fully articulate some of the ideas we had come up with, all while reinforcing to us how much thought we had given to our concepts. View our presentation slides