By Natalie Yee. This post has also been published on Extra Credit - a tech blog by Guild Education.

Like the rest of the world, Guild Education has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic at many levels of our business — from the employee experience to how we serve our students, many of whom are front-line workers in retail and healthcare.

During this time, one of our primary goals is to continue to support prospective and current students. While our current practices and products aim to be usable and inclusive, we have to adapt to support students during a pandemic.

In this post:

How teams at Guild are adapting their roles to better support students.
How to use inclusive design to ensure products still meet the needs of people who are stressed, distracted, or in any way impacted by the current state of the world.

Across Guild

Many teams across Guild interact directly with students. And true to the nature of a start-up, they’re all quickly adapting current processes to better support students in this environment. Here are a few themes we’ve seen across the company from our coaching teams, research, and marketing.

Increased flexibility

Guild coaches and advisors provide guidance to students through phone calls, emails, or texts during all parts of the journey back to school — from finding the right program to starting courses. The student-facing roles featured in this post are Education Coaches, who help students understand their benefit and find the right program and Student Success Advisors who help enrolled students balance work, life, and school

While coaches always strive to be flexible with students, it’s especially important right now in all phases of the student journey. When students first learn about their benefit and are looking for the right program, they have the opportunity to talk with an Education Coach. Riley Siegel, an Education Coach, says her team in ensuring students know about the flexibility Guild provides:

The focus is to be respectful of our students and make sure that they know we are here to support them whenever they are ready to take advantage of their benefit.

Once students are enrolled in a program, they are paired with a Student Success Advisor. Sam Kennedy, a Team Lead and advisor for Penn Foster High School has also adapted their communication to support flexibility:

Some students see this as a great opportunity to get ahead in school. Others are overwhelmed and barely have enough energy to handle responsibilities at work and home. If a student is stressing about finding time for school I might ask questions like ‘What would you tell me if I were in your shoes?’ or ‘How are you getting your essential needs met?’ I always remind students that school will be here whenever they have time.

Another team focusing on flexibility is Guild’s research department. They capture, analyze, and deliver key insights about the student experience using interviews, surveys, data analysis, and other methodologies. The team acted quickly in mid-March and created a document outlining standard operating procedures and updated research guidelines for a state of emergency.

The team always strives to create a positive and empathetic experience for research participants and took this time as an opportunity to share their guiding principles with the rest of Guild. One of those principles is being flexible, both with research participants and their process. Senior Researcher Rachel Tydlacka explains that the team is constantly monitoring their research activity and working to determine if new research topics are appropriate for students during this time.

Making space

Advisors are being intentional about making space for non-school topics if they arise during calls. Sam explains how they are “giving students complete control over our calls and letting them know that they can use that space to process COVID-19 related things.”

Similarly, the research department is adjusting its student conversations to make space. Rachel explains that another guiding principle for their team is to:

Lead all communication and conversations with empathy and be “human first” — meaning it is okay to talk about the coronavirus and understand how the world today is impacting our students.

Guild’s marketing team frequently features student stories on both social media and the Open Book blog, a resource for students. Haley Thomas, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations explains that her team plays “a role in elevating the experiences of our students who have a story to tell during this crisis.” In addition, marketing is continuing to remind students that they have a coach to lean on during this time.

Providing resources

Another way advisors are supporting students is by sending more non-school related outreach, like self-care resources, information about free/discounted internet, and fun resources like virtual hikes, virtual museum exhibits, and creative lessons for kids. Sam and their team sent a short survey to students to better understand how to serve them during this time, and one insight was that many students want to receive lighthearted jokes and memes from their advisors.

The marketing team is also creating new content for students to use as resources during this time. The Open Book blog features relevant posts about knowing when to ask for help and finding balance, and our Instagram account has quick tips for alleviating stress.

Open Book blog and Guild social media post

While Guild is just one aspect of our students’ lives, the coaches, advisors, researchers, and marketers all see this time as an opportunity to be flexible, make space, and provide resources.

Inclusive design

Students interact with our product differently than the roles explained above but all of us at Guild shape the student experience. It’s important to be intentional about designing our product in an inclusive way that meets a variety of user needs during challenging times. Design teams can also increase flexibility, make space, and provide resources through our product experience by designing for stress cases.

Stress cases

One way to be more intentional about design is by considering stress cases. I was introduced to the idea of stress cases in the book Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Eric and Sara propose reframing “edge cases” to “stress cases” in an effort to design for all types of people in all types of situations. Their argument is that we easily push edge cases out of focus and choose not to solve them, whether that be intentionally or unintentionally. This could result in excluding people from using our product.

For example, if we said that Guild students having limited time was an edge case and built a product that required hours of time to get started, we’d be leaving out a large population of prospective students that just don’t have the time needed. If we instead called it a stress case and designed for it, we’d likely end up building a more inclusive product that worked for people whether they had minutes or hours of undivided time.

With that thinking in mind, here are three stress cases that designers should consider to ensure the experience they’re creating is inclusive now and later. While global crises are thankfully few and far between, day-to-day life can be just as unpredictable and challenging.

1.) Design for emotional distress

Stress has an impact on our body, mood, and behavior (Source: Mayo Clinic and also being a person). While all three impact how we interact with the world around us, changes to our mood, like lack of focus and feeling overwhelmed, can impact how we interact with digital products. For many Guild students, the process of going back to school is unfamiliar. Add a global pandemic on top of that, and it’s even more necessary to have a product that considers the impacts of stress and designs for it.

The first step to designing for stress is understanding the stress cases people could be under when using a product. The authors of Design for Real Life recommend a workshop to expose various stress cases and to think about how your current product either passes or fails in these scenarios. For Guild, a few stress cases could be extremely long hours in a retail job, being temporarily out of work, or having financial stress. We want to ensure our product is easy to understand, intuitive to use, and doesn’t cause any additional stress.

One of the best ways you can design for stress is to write in plain language and avoid jargon. When we’re anxious, it’s much harder to absorb complex language, something we’ve all learned recently from the constant COVID-19 news. We should think of all the words on our website as resources for our students that provide clarity and reassurance.

At Guild, our senior UX writer, Lisa Collins reviews the words we use for topics that are traditionally complex, like higher education, tuition funding, and eligibility for employee benefits. A resource we like is the Readability Guidelines from Content Design London.

Content Design London Readability Guidelines

2.) Design for distraction

People have enough distractions in their life, especially right now, so it’s crucial to reduce distraction and cognitive overload in our product through design. Cognitive load is essentially the “brainpower” it takes to do something and human brains have a limited amount (Neilsen Norman Group). If someone is using a lot of their brainpower outside of the screen you’re designing, it may take longer for them to complete a task.

One way to ensure your product experience isn’t adding more distraction is to keep people focused on a specific task. Guild’s program quiz, a tool that helps students find programs that match their interests and qualifications, is an example. It asks prospective students a single question at a time and progresses automatically on most pages. In addition, the quiz lives on its own page so there are no visual distractions surrounding it. The quiz wasn’t designed with a pandemic in mind, but it was designed to be very simple, focused, and fast which makes it easier to use during times of high distraction.

Another way to design for distraction is to increase flexibility. While we can’t communicate flexibility in a back and forth conversation like Guild advisors, we can make our product more flexible. For example, completing an entire application in one sitting may be challenging when distraction is high. Features like auto-save and the ability to leave and come back at any time seem obvious but are crucial for inclusive design.

Example of single questions in Guild’s program quiz

3.) Design for basic needs

The last time I thought about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was my freshman year psychology course complete with a lab rat named Penelope. Thankfully, Lauren Krabbe, my manager and Director of Experience Design at Guild, referenced it the other day in relation to design. Usually, Guild is aiming to fulfill the needs at the top of the pyramid — esteem and self-actualization. Our goal is to provide economic mobility through education while increasing confidence and enabling career growth. While we are still working towards that goal, Guild has an opportunity to address the needs on the lower part of the pyramid.

As we read above, many Guilders in student-facing roles are focusing more on student’s safety needs and acknowledging that changes to health, employment, and resources will impact a student's ability to reach the top of the pyramid through education. A coach having a one-on-one phone call or sending a personalized email can help students feel supported and encouraged. Having this kind of impact through a product is a bit more challenging.

One way we attempt to do this is by making space for and acknowledging emotions that may come up for students when using our product. We know that going back to school is a big decision and some of our students had negative experiences in the past. In the program quiz, we try to provide a sense of security by giving students a way to reflect on their emotions and reassuring them that there are programs for everyone.

The beginning of the quiz asks students how they’re feeling about the process and reminds them that our coaches are always there to provide support.

How we address emotions in Guild’s program quiz

When we ask for GPA, which helps us recommend programs that students will qualify for, we do our best to explain why we’re asking and to provide reassurance that there are programs for everyone. From user interviews, we know that this question makes some people anxious and brings them back to a challenging time of life. We keep an eye on this text and experience and will continue to make adjustments to best provide that sense of security.

If we move up a row on Maslow’s hierarchy, we’re on the Love and Belonging level. While it may sound strange initially, design can also help meet this need by creating a sense of connection and belonging.

One way we do this is by providing photos, quotes, and videos from real students on our social media channels and in our product. For example, a Walmart associate would see the photo and quote below when they’re considering signing up to use their education benefit through Guild. Seeing a real human and hearing their experience provides a sense of connection and security that this benefit is the real deal.

Key takeaways

Here at Guild, creating inclusive student experiences is a shared responsibility, and there’s so much we can learn from each other. The way our student-facing, research, and marketing teams have quickly adjusted to better support students is a model for the design and product teams. Creating inclusive product experiences is always a priority, but challenging times like this can help us refocus and be more intentional about our way of approaching problems and solutions.

To recap:

If you interact directly with people in a support role, remember to provide increased flexibility, make space for reactions and discussions around COVID-19, and provide relevant resources.
If you are a designer or have an impact on a product, think about “stress cases” and take into account people who are stressed, distracted, and concerned about basic needs like health and employment.