Putting powerful tuition tools at students’ fingertips
California-based National University (NU) envisioned offering prospective students an intuitive “tuition estimator” that would provide clear and practical insights into the cost of their schooling. Brick Factory was asked to design, test, and implement the concept. View Estimator
Project Goals
Simple, Powerful Functionality
Programming for high-level calculations works seamlessly and elegantly behind an easily navigable interface.
Financial Aid Awareness
Since 60% of NU students qualify for aid, Brick Factory integrated the ability to identify – and visualize the financial impact of – sources of aid and scholarships.
Invitation to Interact
Site flow encourages prospective students to engage with NU by applying for admission or asking questions about enrollment.
Process and Features
Initially, Brick Factory created multiple stylistically and functionally distinct designs for the Tuition Estimator tool. Before implementation, those designs were then thoroughly tested on prospective students to evaluate their efficacy. Students were surveyed about the ease of use, timing, and inclusion of site elements and overall design. The results of those tests were then used to inform the buildout and functionality of the concept.
Accordingly, the final iteration of the tool updates estimated costs in real-time as users progress through the five orderly steps. Changing variables is straightforward and quickly reflected in the overall estimate. Based on user-supplied information, military and partnership discounts are automatically applied, and appropriate, additional scholarship options are suggested. And, as life’s distractions inevitably occur, the tool saves user progress for smooth, no-loss resumption.
Technology
The National University website is built in WordPress. Over the past several years, the site has been transitioning to use the WordPress Block Editor more. Knowing this, the Tuition Estimator is built as a custom WordPress block.
Developers can make a variety of choices when it comes to planning a new site feature. At its core, the Tuition Estimator runs on a custom JavaScript class. The class is built around a series of base-level attributes and a series of selectors we know will always be present. Every method within the class is written to be used asynchronously, which allows users to change inputs rapidly.
The user-facing portion of the Tuition Estimator is an HTML form built into the WordPress block. We went back and forth over building the form using WordPress components so that a Content Editor could update the text. Ultimately, we opted to lockdown the form components to allow for greater programmatic control in the long term.