Comments on: Does ANYBODY have an admissions application to be proud of?

By: Bradjward

Bradjward — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:19:40 +0000

@joehaxor – I didn’t say it was pretty, did I? Do you want functionality or something that ‘looks nice’? Our in-house workers who built this stuff don’t know a lick of design. But it’s cheaper than paying a company like Royall a small fortune to duplicate.

By: Paul Redfern

Paul Redfern — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:08:01 +0000

Why reinvent the wheel? The common application does this so well?

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:06:18 +0000

This isn't a college application, but I think it's the best example of form design I've seen in years. VoteForChange.com gets you registered to vote in two minutes flat. The big things to take away from this are big font sizes, big input elements and friendly, relaxed language. Oh, and the form values are saved to dynamically generate the PDF that you mail in. Obviously it would be optimal for the university to receive form submissions electronically instead of through snail mail, but in the case of voting and possible fraud, it makes sense to make the PDF.

By: Drew Millikin

Drew Millikin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:49:59 +0000

Ours is so bad we ditched in favor of the common app. Yeah, that’s how bad it was. I haven’t seen many good ones out there, but Royall’s (the search company) fast app is pretty decent. http://www.royallu.org.

By: joehaxor

joehaxor — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:08:59 +0000

@bradjward

that is an awful application. both ugly and annoying.

By: gilzow

gilzow — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:46:36 +0000

I’ll second what Lacy said : the ability to save and come back later to complete.

By: Bradjward

Bradjward — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:23:44 +0000

Ours was built in-house and is pretty decent. It has the save without submitting feature that Lacy mentions. Feel free to check it out at https://www.butler.edu/boa (direct link).

By: Karlyn

Karlyn — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:49:48 +0000

FireEngineRed has a really great online application product you might want to check out….I was pretty pleased with the final product I built when I was at Norwich. It was a logic-based form, so users only saw the content that was relevant to them instead of everything (a lot of schools will require different info from difference constituencies), you could make it so the form was pre-populated based on forms the student had already filled out, you could save and come back to it, each page was pretty short so it wasn’t overwhelming and content was grouped appropriately.

Also, you really need to look at this in context of what a prospective student is seeing – most applications ask for pretty much the same information so its unlikely that students won’t know where to get it from unless yours is the very first application they see/fill out….even then, students these days are pretty well coached by their teachers/guidance counselors before they even start this process.

Good luck!

By: drew

drew — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:45:35 +0000

Oh, but I want an app that works well, AND is pretty. A joy to use. Maybe include a nature soundtrack to soothe the user as they offer up information.

By: Lacy

Lacy — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:37:52 +0000

Ability to save and come back to the form without submitting … this was “critical” in my own application process for graduate school. Being able to complete certain parts of the application … save… and come back later. Wonderful. All of my recommendations were handled through the online form as well – which was great. (https://graduateapplications.vanderbilt.edu/ – it’s not pretty – but it worked pretty well!)