January 1, 2025
A proof of concept for equitable form‑filling (VERO)
I designed a dialect-aware, multi agency guidance layer to help students and families track, understand, and complete complex college paperwork across fragmented public systems.
MY ROLE
UX research
Systems strategy
Interaction design
UX writing
Prototype direction
PRIMARY USERS
Students
Parents and guardians
High school counselors
College support staff
FOCUS AREAS
FAFSA and TAP
Admissions paperwork
College portals
Parent handoff
Language access
Problem
College paperwork is treated like a set of forms, but students experience it as one confusing public service journey.
Students and families do not move through FAFSA, TAP, admissions, school portals, tax documents, emails, deadlines, corrections, and school-specific requirements as separate systems. They experience all of it as one high-stakes process.
The problem is not only that forms are hard to fill out. The deeper issue is that users often do not know what step they are on, what still needs to happen, who owns the next action, or how to fix a mistake once something goes wrong.
This is especially difficult for first-generation students, immigrant families, multilingual households, students with disabilities, and students without strong support at home. The more the process relies on informal knowledge, the more it rewards families who already understand how college systems work.
Constraint
The hard part was not designing one cleaner form. The hard part was designing around disconnected systems.
FAFSA, TAP, admissions systems, school portals, counselor processes, parent tax information, email reminders, and college-specific requirements all operate separately. A student can submit one part correctly and still miss an important step somewhere else.
That meant the solution could not be framed as a replacement for FAFSA, TAP, or college portals. It needed to act as a guidance layer that helps people move across existing systems with more clarity.
How might we help students and families understand where they are, what they still need, and how to complete each step without relying entirely on informal support?
Research Approach
I studied where students, parents, and counselors lose track of the process.
I interviewed students, parents, a TRIO counselor, and high school counseling staff to understand how college paperwork actually gets completed. The research focused on FAFSA, TAP, admissions, deadlines, parent information, counselor support, language barriers, and error recovery.
- Students described confusion around what information they needed and where to find it.
- Parents described unclear financial questions, sensitive information sharing, and long correction cycles.
- Counselors described follow-through as one of the main breakdown points after students submit an application.
- Families with stronger organization created their own spreadsheets and checklists to make up for what systems did not show clearly.
- The same theme appeared across interviews: people were not only filling out forms. They were managing a fragmented service journey without a shared map.
“Once they fill out the form, they think that’s it.”
Writing for websites is both simple and complex. On the one hand, all you need to do is say what you mean and in your words.
Why its a problem/hard to fix
The second paragraph of an article is sometimes called the “nut graph,” which is short for “nutshell paragraph.” That’s because this is usually where the article gets to the heart of the matter—the main point. After the first section, the reader is ready to hear what’s truly at stake in this piece of writing. They’re invested. They’re paying attention. If your piece is long enough to have long, multi-paragraph sections, then you’ll want to use this strategy throughout to make sure you’re holding reader attention in a consistent way.
Research approach
Finally you arrive at the ending of the article. This is a good place to wrap things up and conclude with takeaways. If you’re writing something for a more traditional publication, it can be nice to end on an anecdote that mirrors the theme of the piece. If you’re putting together some content for a company blog, you’ll probably just want to close out in a tidy way and include a CTA of some kind. Writers should take note: Usually, when you write a draft, you finally get to the main point at the end. An old editing trick is to take that idea and put it at the top of the piece. Consider whether that would work for you in this case.
What we learned (reword to one word matching study)
Finally you arrive at the ending of the article. This is a good place to wrap things up and conclude with takeaways. If you’re writing something for a more traditional publication, it can be nice to end on an anecdote that mirrors the theme of the piece. If you’re putting together some content for a company blog, you’ll probably just want to close out in a tidy way and include a CTA of some kind. Writers should take note: Usually, when you write a draft, you finally get to the main point at the end. An old editing trick is to take that idea and put it at the top of the piece. Consider whether that would work for you in this case.