Zero to one for applicants the system could not see

Context and stakes

International applicants to Ontario colleges had no path of their own. They were routed through a domestic application flow that structurally could not serve them, while navigating visas, foreign credentials, payments, and deadlines where one confusing form can cost an academic year.

My role

I designed the International Application platform from zero: accounts, forms, payments, document workflows, status tracking, and multi user operational needs, carried through three full design iterations before launch.

What I built or changed

On my own initiative I set up biweekly interviews with call centre staff, turning frontline support conversations into a continuous pipeline of the highest volume user problems. Two fixes show how that loop paid off.

First, passwords: the platform demanded bank grade complexity for a college application, so applicants forgot their passwords, called in, reset them, and repeated the cycle. I traced roughly 15% of support calls to this, presented the call volume data, and approval was immediate.

Second, school names: an open text field invited misspellings that created phantom school records and recurring phone cleanup. I replaced it with structured selection.

Outcomes and open threads

Support calls dropped by that 15% almost instantly after release. The school name problem disappeared at the source.