District barriers study
AI tools & strategy
A 10-college UX study of the student journey, mapping barriers and turning them into prioritized, human-in-the-loop AI pilots. My League for Innovation Fellows project.
What it is
A UX study of the student journey across all 10 Maricopa colleges, which together serve roughly 140,000 students. It maps where students hit barriers as they move from application to the goal they came for, using heuristic evaluation, Nielsen severity rating, and journey mapping. The findings become prioritized, human-in-the-loop AI pilots, and every option is screened against a hard no-student-data line.
Who it’s for
The district, its students, and the administrators who decide where support goes. The work is Michelle’s League for Innovation Fellows project, run for the committee that coordinates AI across the 10 colleges.
The goal
Find the friction that quietly pushes students out, then close it with AI where AI genuinely helps and hand off the rest to a person. The aim is more human contact where it matters, not less, measured against a real baseline.
How it works
Research personas walk the live student journey, one persona, one campus, one task at a time, so a failure is attributable to a specific barrier. Each barrier is rated for severity and mapped to a proposed AI fix, ranked first by how many students it would reach. No student data is collected at any point: counts and aggregates only, never any PII.