Studium: Simplifying Accreditation
Industry
Ed-tech
Timeline
Jul 2023 - Jun 2024
Organization
Studium Tech
My Role
UI/UX Designer
Team
1 Product Manager, 2 Expert advisors, 2 Developers, 2 Customer success executives
Type
Live project
Description
Studium is a B2B SaaS platform that helps higher-education institutions manage accreditations. Over two years, I worked across research, UX and UI design to simplify complex accreditation workflows for institutes' faculty and management.
Note: Product screens are not displayed due to confidentiality & company IP restrictions.
The problem: accreditation is a distributed process
Accreditation requires institutions to coordinate data, documentation and evidence across departments and stakeholders, often over long and recurring cycles.
User Personas
The buyer and user of the product were different stakeholders in this case, Directors and other top management being buyers and faculty and admin being users. This is what made designing for them challenging as well as interesting.
Where the process broke down
Design opportunities
These questions became the guiding principles of the product experience.
What we heard from the stakeholders
Accreditation competes with teaching and research. Faculty saw it as a burden & wanted to focus on daily teaching activities.
Faculty working on accreditation manually using spreadsheets & local storage was tedious and unreliable.
Management needed to know if they were ready to go for an accreditation cycle and how much they'd score based on their current status.
Accreditation data can become a foundation for tracking institutional improvement over time.
What we set out to do
01 — Simplify
Make accreditation criteria easier to understand and complete.
02 — Centralize
Bring data, documentation and evidence into one online system.
03 — Monitor
Give management visibility into progress and gaps across heirarchy.
04 — Improve
Turn accreditation data into actionable insights across cycles.
05 — Automate
Reduce repetitive report generation and documentation work.
From blind spot to full picture
Here's how we created a better user experience for all our stakeholders through the platform:
What challenged and shaped me
The user & the buyer of the product were different in our case, the top management being buyers but IQAC and faculty being the daily users. Designing a product that added value to both stakeholders taught me design as well as business priorities.
Accreditation requires 3–5 years of backdated data. I often saw institutes struggle to compile it last minute. So we designed the system to encourage a continuous data collection habit from the start.
Different accreditation bodies often request overlapping data. We designed for single-entry multiple-use, allowing institutions to reuse stored data across accreditations.
Impact that we had
Faculties reported spending less time studying documentation and more time teaching.
Entire accreditation workload systematically decentralized & distributed.
Saved time with no manual formatting & compilation work to make final reports.
No duplicate work for multiple different accreditations.
Management understood their accreditation-readiness and areas for improvement before the actual cycle, giving them a chance to improve.
