Prospective
(01)
Matching Students to Money
Finding scholarship opportunities for school shouldn't feel stressful and overwhelming. Prospective is a web app that helps students cut through the noise by matching them with scholarships that fit their specific skills and grades. No endless searching required.
My Role
Lead Designer
Timeline
6 Weeks
Project Type
MVP Pitch
Designing for the late night grind
Imagine a student on their phone at midnight, stressed about tuition. The app lives here, in the margins of a busy life. Designing for this context meant balancing trust with simplicity, ensuring students know the money is real and the process are manageable.
Examples of traditional scholarship search UI
Constraints
Trust is non-negotiable
The system handles sensitive data like grades and financial status, so it had to look secure.
Mobile-first design
Students do almost everything on their phones, so the design had to be fully responsive.
Information density
Scholarships are text heavy. The challenge was making them readable on small screens while maintaining the same level of information.
Framing the Issue
It's not that there aren't enough scholarships; it's that finding the right one is a nightmare. Students are missing out on thousands of dollars simply because the search process is confusing, outdated, and riddled with dead links. To address this, we needed to focus on designing a system that already knows what you qualify for before you even start searching, and then make it easy to manage those opportunities in one place.
Pain Points
Am I eligible?
Students waste hours reading fine print only to realize they don't qualify.
Deadlines are the enemy
Managing 20 different deadlines across different websites feels overwhelming without assistance.
The legitimacy gap
Many scholarship search platforms have dated designs and fake listings, making students hesitant to invest their time and share their personal information.
Flipping the model
Instead of the student searching for the scholarship, the scholarship should find the student. We moved from a database query to a personalized concierge.
Solutions
Streamlining Data Entry
Profile setup can be tedious. We simplified it down to several questions that students can answer in minutes. The app then uses this data to automatically match them with relevant scholarships.
Visualizing Urgency
We replaced static dates with a color-coded timeline with custom reminders. This helps students manage their time around filling out these applications, rather than just a calendar.
Advanced filtering & Match Indicators
On daily basis, students will receive recommendations based on their profile so all they have to do is review and apply.
Profile views, and scholarship card states
Onboarding Flow
The Onboarding flow is designed to be quick and engaging. Students answer a series of simple questions about their academic background, interests, and financial need.
A mockup of the interactive Blend Explorer page.
Search Results
What differentiates this from a traditional search, is by default it operates under the assumption that where students are shown scholarships they qualify for. They can then filter down or make adjustments on the results based on other criteria like deadline, and GPA. The goal was to make the search process feel more like browsing a personalized feed of opportunities rather than sifting through a general database.
Search results flow
Dark Mode Theme
A dedicated dark mode theme was designed to ensure color hierarchy and visual cues remain clear and effective. This keeps the UI accessible in low light environments.
Dark mode theme for the home, search and profile pages.
