This is the pilot public-site walkthrough, the proof of concept that began in May and kicked off this work. An AI agent acted as a brand-new student trying to self-serve, and navigated the public websites of Glendale Community College and Mesa Community College from the homepage with no login, given six common problems and never a destination. Below is what actually happened: the path, the steps, a Nielsen severity rating, an agent-readiness note, and the AI opportunity each barrier points to. It is a small, honest slice that proves the method works. The ratings are first-pass and a human still has to verify them. Authenticated depth and all 10 colleges come in the fall fieldwork.
The case study describes a UX research method: walk the student journey as a real student would, given a felt need and not a URL, and record every barrier. This page is the first live run of that method. It is deliberately small. One AI agent, two colleges, public pages only, no account and no login. The point is not to grade these two colleges. It is to show that the method produces concrete, decision-ready findings, and to surface the patterns that the full fall study will measure across all 10.
“I want to apply, how do I start?” · “I am failing a class, where do I get tutoring?” · “When is the FAFSA deadline and who do I ask?” · “I think I need disability accommodations, where do I go?” · “I need food or I cannot pay rent, does the college help?” · “Who is my advisor and how do I get advising?” No task named an office. The AI agent had to find it the way a lost student would.
Every row is a real walk taken during the pilot proof of concept, on the live public site. “Severity” is the AI agent’s preliminary Nielsen rating, which a human still needs to confirm: 0 is no problem, 4 is a usability catastrophe. “Agent-readiness (AX)” asks a second question: if a student turned their own AI assistant loose on this, could the assistant find and parse the answer, or is it trapped in a PDF, an unlabeled link, or a login wall?
Severity: 0 none · 1 cosmetic · 2 minor · 3 major · 4 catastrophe AX: readable partial poor
| Task | College | What happened | Path / steps | Severity | AX | AI opportunity it suggests |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apply, where do I start? | Glendale | Clear “Apply Now / Get Started” in the header. Landed on a four-step enrollment guide (Get admitted, Student Center tasks, Register, Pay). Solid. The catch: the printable Enrollment Steps Guide is a downloadable PDF, English and Spanish, not an HTML page. | Home → Apply Now → New Student Enrollment. 2 clicks to the steps. | 1 | partial | An agent can read the on-page steps but not the PDF guide. Offer the guide as a plain HTML page so a student’s assistant can quote the steps back. |
| Apply, where do I start? | Mesa | Strong. “Get Started / Enroll Now” everywhere. The enrollment page splits by student type (New, Returning, High School, Non-credit) and lays out numbered steps inline on the page. Easiest task of the set. | Home → Enroll → pick student type. 1–2 clicks. | 0 | readable | Low. This is the model: steps in HTML, labeled by who you are. A good template to lift for the colleges that bury apply. |
| Failing a class, where is tutoring? | Glendale | Tutoring lives under Academics, not under Help or Student Life where a struggling student looks first. The page itself rendered almost empty without JavaScript: just a welcome line and “see the tiles below,” with the tiles not loading. The office is the “Center for Learning.” | Home → Academics → Tutoring. 2 clicks, then a near-blank page. | 3 | poor | Content rendered only by JavaScript is invisible to many assistants and slow connections. Surface tutoring hours, subjects, and the booking link as plain text a bot can read. |
| Failing a class, where is tutoring? | Mesa | Tutoring is under Current Students. The office is the “Learning Enhancement Center (LEC).” Clear page: free, in-person, virtual and online, no appointment needed except Japanese. Hours and buildings listed. A new (not-yet-enrolled) student would not realize tutoring is for current students only. | Home → Current Students → Tutoring. 2 clicks. | 1 | readable | Different name than Glendale (LEC vs Center for Learning). A district-wide “I need tutoring” router could map the local name automatically. |
| FAFSA deadline, who do I ask? | Glendale | The obvious page, Financial Aid → Important Dates, does NOT list the FAFSA deadline. It lists disbursement, Pell recalculation, and appeal dates only. The actual FAFSA deadline (June 30) is on a different page, How to Apply. A student who clicks the page literally called “Important Dates” leaves without the date they came for. | Home → Pay For College → Important Dates (wrong) → back out → How to Apply (right). 3+ clicks. | 3 | partial | The date exists but is shelved under the wrong label. A factual-question bot (“when is the FAFSA deadline?”) would answer instantly and end the page hunt. |
| FAFSA deadline, who do I ask? | Mesa | The Financial Aid landing page gives no deadline at all, only that processing “can vary from 2 to 6 weeks” and to “apply early.” No date, no clear “ask us here” beyond a toll-free number. A worried student gets urgency but no answer. | Home → Financial Aid. 1 click, no date found. | 4 | poor | Highest-severity finding. The single most-asked aid question has no findable answer. A no-PII factual bot that states the deadline and the priority date is the clearest, highest-reach fix in the set. |
| I may need accommodations | Glendale | Office is “Disability Resources & Services (DRS),” under Student Life. New-student path is a “New Student Application” in an external portal (accessiblelearning.com). Required documentation and the verification form are PDFs. A student must already know to call it a “disability” service, not “accommodations,” to find it. | Home → Student Life → Disability Resources & Services. 2 clicks. | 2 | partial | Vocabulary gap: students search “accommodations” or “ADHD help,” the page says “disability.” A plain-language router that accepts the student’s words and forms in PDFs are the two fixes. |
| I may need accommodations | Mesa | Same office name, “Disability Resources & Services (DRS),” with a clear page: qualifying conditions listed (Autism, ADHD, anxiety, PTSD, and more), a Getting Started link, and a New Student Application. Notably the application portal is a GCCAZ-branded URL shared across colleges, which can read as “wrong school” to a wary student. | Home → Current Students → Disability Resources & Services. 2 clicks. | 1 | readable | Same service, same name at both colleges, good for a crosswalk. But the shared portal URL needs a label so students and agents trust they are in the right place. |
| I need food, I cannot pay rent | Glendale | Strong once found. The team is “GCC Cares,” reached under Student Life → Basic Needs (an in-page anchor). Nine clear resource cards: food, housing, transportation, money, health, childcare, government programs. Same-day walk-ins. The weak point is findability: “Basic Needs” is a sub-anchor, not a top-level destination, and a student in crisis would not guess to look under Student Life. | Home → Student Life → scroll to Basic Needs. 1 click + scroll. | 2 | partial | The help is excellent and nearly invisible. A “I need food / housing” entry point in Canvas and at enrollment would put GCC Cares where the need is felt. |
| I need food, I cannot pay rent | Mesa | Hardest task of the whole set. There is no “Basic Needs” anywhere in the main navigation. The service is “Student Care Services / Student Care Team,” with food via the “Mesa Market.” It is reachable only by going to the Get Help page and clicking links like “Financial Crisis” or “Care Team: Basic Needs,” many of which are unlabeled node URLs. The referral itself lives on a separate third-party domain. | Home → Current Students → Get Help → hunt the right unlabeled link. 3+ clicks. | 3 | poor | Different name again (Student Care vs GCC Cares; Mesa Market vs Food Resources). High-reach, high-stress need buried behind unlabeled links. Prime candidate for a plain-language router and a labeled entry point. |
| Who is my advisor, how do I get advising? | Glendale | Advisement sits under Become A Student and again under Student Life. The dedicated advisement page returned essentially blank when loaded without JavaScript, so the public answer to “how do I get advising?” failed to render on a direct visit. New-student advising is branded “Gaucho New Student Advisement.” “Who is my advisor” is not answerable without logging in. | Home → Become A Student → Advisement (blank on load). 2 clicks, no content. | 3 | poor | A core page that does not render for a plain visit fails both slow-connection students and agents. Advising modalities and hours should be readable as text. |
| Who is my advisor, how do I get advising? | Mesa | “Academic Advisement” page is thorough: drop-in days, scheduled appointments, live chat hours, email, and specialized tracks (nursing, veterans, athletes). But “who IS my advisor?” is answerable only inside the logged-in Student Center (Academic Progress tile), so the public site explains how to advise but cannot name your person. | Home → Current Students → Academic Advisement. 2 clicks. | 2 | partial | The “name my advisor” answer sits behind a login, correctly (it is personal). The public “how to get advising” content is strong and agent-readable, a good baseline. |
Twelve walks total: six tasks at each of two colleges, during the pilot proof of concept. Severity is the AI agent’s preliminary rating, pending human think-aloud validation in fieldwork. Service names are recorded exactly as the sites label them, and they seed the service crosswalk.
Severity numbers are useful for ranking. The reason they matter is what they feel like. Three moments from the walk, narrated the way a stressed student would actually experience them.
“Money is the whole reason I am scared about this. I find the Financial Aid page, and it just says it can take two to six weeks and that I should apply early. Early before what? There is no date. There is a phone number, but it is the weekend and I do not want to call a stranger to ask a question that should just be on the page. I close the tab.”
The single most-asked aid question, no findable answer. This is the clearest case for a no-PII bot that simply states the deadline.“I am failing math and I go looking for tutoring. It is not under Help, it is under Academics, which feels like it is for picking classes. I finally click Tutoring and the page is basically empty. It says ‘see the tiles below’ and there are no tiles. So now I do not know if tutoring exists, or if my phone is broken.”
Helps that exist read as helps that are missing when the page will not render. A bot reading plain text would have found the hours.“I cannot make rent and I am too embarrassed to say it out loud. I look for ‘basic needs’ in the menu. It is not there. I end up on a giant ‘Get Help’ page and start clicking blue links that just say things like node-eight-one-five-eight. One of them turns out to be a food pantry called Mesa Market. I would never have found that on my own.”
The food pantry is real and good. It is buried behind unlabeled links a student in crisis will not dig through.Two colleges is a small sample, and yet the same shapes appear that the national research predicts. Three patterns are already clear, and all three are the kind a thoughtful AI layer can close without touching a single piece of student data.
Tutoring is the “Center for Learning” at Glendale and the “Learning Enhancement Center” at Mesa. Basic needs is “GCC Cares” at one and “Student Care Services” (with the “Mesa Market” pantry) at the other. A student who learns the word at one college cannot reuse it at the next. This is the service-crosswalk problem, observed live.
GCC Cares is excellent and sits behind a sub-anchor under Student Life. Glendale’s FAFSA deadline is real but shelved under “How to Apply,” not the page literally named “Important Dates.” The gap is almost never that the service is missing. It is that the student cannot find it from the words they would use.
Steps in PDFs (Glendale’s enrollment guide), pages that render blank without JavaScript (Glendale tutoring and advisement), and unlabeled node links (Mesa’s Get Help) are all invisible to a student’s AI assistant. As students arrive with their own agents, these become services those students effectively cannot reach.
The clearest opportunities from this run are factual and public: state the FAFSA deadline, surface tutoring hours, accept “I need food” in plain language and route to the pantry. None of that requires a name, a login, or a record. It is the no-PII model the district already prefers. And it is squarely staff-relieving: when the page answers “when is the FAFSA deadline” or “where is tutoring,” the financial-aid specialist and the advisor stop fielding the same easy question over and over and the “we will get back to you” email shrinks. The student with a genuinely complicated situation still reaches a person, faster, because the routine questions are off the desk. No one is replaced. The busywork is.
Read against the case study’s reach-first ranking, the standouts are the high-volume, every-student questions: the FAFSA deadline (severity 4 at Mesa, 3 at Glendale) and the basic-needs route (severity 3 at Mesa). Those are exactly where a light, data-sovereign router or factual bot reaches the most students for the least build. That is the prioritization logic, confirmed on live pages instead of asserted.