User experience has been one of the most important elements of web design for years now. Whether it’s a website or an application, it needs to have a great user experience in order for people to get as many people as possible to use it.
The same principle of UX applies to scholarships – here’s how and why.
Students have short attention spans
As human beings, our attention spans are not great in general. It doesn’t take much for us to get distracted and stop focusing on the task at hand. Students are slightly better than the average since they sit through lectures every day and their attention span is around 15 minutes. That means that after the 15-minute mark, their attention will drift away.
This same logic applies to scholarships. When you’re designing your application pages, make sure that they are super easy to use and most of all, that they are short. If your scholarship application takes more than 15 minutes to complete, it means that it’s too long for the average student to wait until the end. Sure, the student may want the scholarship reward, but don’t forget that there are thousands of scholarships out there and you need to try very hard to stay competitive. In other words, send your application to a few students as a test. If it takes them more than 15 minutes to apply, scrap and redo the application page.
You want to stay up to date
Think of the apps that students use every day. Instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat, Facebook, Tinder, Spotify… They all have one thing in common. Both their logo designs and interface are flawless and adopting and using them takes no more than a few minutes. Intuitively, you know what to do when you open one of these apps, such as Fresha, an app with amazing UX.
Students today are used to an excellent user experience from the apps they use every day. An app or page needs to load quickly, have logically placed buttons, clear calls to action and more. If you want them to apply and complete their applications, you can’t ask them to send in their details through an email or a Word document.
Instead, your scholarship applications need to be modern, intuitively designed pages or apps reminiscent of the apps that students use every day.
UX forces you to rethink everything
User experience is much more than design. It’s how your application elements are ordered, which fonts and colors you use, which requirements you set before students and much more. A great user experience is a combination of a variety of different elements.
As you’re about to launch a scholarship, this forces you to rethink all the elements on an application page. You want the student to minimize their effort and as a result, you find ways to make it smoother. For most people using a scholarship management system (such as ScholarshipOwl for business), this means testing how different elements are ordered and adding/removing requirements.
In ScholarshipOwl for business, we created the basic scholarship application template based on the scholarships that have the highest number of applicants. In other words, once you launch a scholarship, you’ll get a default set of elements that guarantees a high rate of applicants.
Don’t make great scholarship UX an afterthought
You probably have limited time to spend on scholarships as a marketing tool, so why spend the time worrying about it? When you use a great scholarship management system such as Scholarship App, the applications are designed by default to look great, be easy to fill out and bring you as many applicants as possible.
Sign up today for free to try it out!
