Background

Business Opportunity

In 2011, there was a lot of conversation around the future of higher education. After years of exceeding growth projections, enrollments were down and the cost to attend a four-year program was at an all-time high. Many institutions were closing because they couldn't enroll enough students to meet their operating costs. The Higher Education community was taking a hard look at how to attract more students and retain them year-to-year.

At this time, Campus Labs was also growing. They were building new tools to collect, connect, and analyze big data. They realized that they could leverage their data collection and analysis expertise to build a student success and retention tool that would bring together information from disparate and unconnected systems on campus.

From a fiscal perspective, if an institution retained one student for one year, the software license would pay for itself.

Beacon Basics

Beacon is an early alert and centralized notation system that capitalizes on a myriad of data to inform and coordinate interventions with at-risk and success-oriented students.

Connections

Beacon's power comes from its connections to many different data streams and sources. While powerful on its own, the more Campus Labs products a campus is using, the more data is available in the system. The Beacon interface is optimized to transform and surface the most important data from whichever data sources are available.

Beacon was the first product at Campus Labs to pull multiple product data streams into one interface and was the impetus for many back-end development efforts including creating a universal user.

User Insights

Throughout the development of Beacon, we met with students, advisors, administrators, and executives to understand their motivations and goals in terms of success and retention on campus. Through in-person interviews, campus visits, phone calls, surveys, in-house focus groups, and beta testing, we checked-in with our users early, and often, to test our hypotheses and inform our decisions.

We also benefitted from Campus Labs policy of hiring support members and consultants with backgrounds in Higher Ed. There was always someone around the office to bounce ideas off of.

Here are the high-level user insights that informed our design process:

Role	Insight
Student	Overwhelmed by all the (often conflicting) information and resources on campus Don't know where to go for help Feel like they don't have a clear path to follow to succeed
Advisor	Feel like they don't have enough time in the day Need help figuring out who is most at-risk and what to do about it Only have a short time with each student to make an impact Don't want to learn or work with another complicated system
Executives	Don't have a clear data on how campus resources are being used Have a mandate to improve retention numbers Need more data on which retention efforts are making a difference

User Experience Goals

• Make the product easy to use from the outset

  Include default/best-practice settings so users can start using the product without a lot of forms or setup.

• Collect information with a purpose

  Only ask for information that has a direct use in Beacon and is not available in another accessible system.

• Design globally

  Build tools and features with all clients in mind. Do not complicate the user experience with institution-specific toolsets.

• Put Beacon to work for the user

  Supply users with important information and insights without a lot of setup or oversight.

• Less time in Beacon, is more time for students

  Make information easy to find and digest. Build tools that help users achieve their goals quickly and efficiently.

Biggest Challenges

• Users don't want to learn another system

  Institutions are using multiple systems at the campus, department, and program levels to track and manage student information. Most of it doesn't share or connect data, and sometimes its a paper filing system.

• Users don't want to put the same information into multiple system

  Multiple systems that don't talk to each other means duplicated work.

• Agile vs. Campus implementation timeline

  We are releasing features and tools weekly and monthly - campuses think in semesters and years.

• Proving it works

  With all the different resources and interactions on campus, how do we show Beacon is helping?