A USER-FOCUSED SCHOOL SEARCH APPLICATION
The Secondary School Admission Test is taken by students who wish to apply to private secondary schools. As a service to both parents and their member schools, SSAT provides an online school search feature that helps parents and students find the school that best meets their needs.
Until now, most school search applications were difficult to use. Parents had to step through pages and pages of clunky and confusing web forms. Worst of all, it wasn’t until the end of the process, sometimes after filling out a dozen pages of forms, that the parent would see they had no results – their search was too specific. Time to start over.
POWERFUL AND EASY TO USE
SSAT asked FutureMedia to create a user-friendly application to help parents through this process. They wanted it to look good, be easy to use, and to give immediate feedback to the user. The simple graphical interface looks like friendly software rather than a clunky web form. It allows parents to filter schools on a variety of criteria (distance from a zip code, co-ed or single gender, etc), and the results are updated in real time.
This means that if the parent entered criteria that too narrowly reduced their results, they would be told immediately. Then, it’s easy to make changes to their criteria to get more satisfactory results. In addition, parents can rate the importance of various criteria, weighting some as higher or lower priority. This affects the order that schools are presented in the list, making it easier for users to review their options.
VISUAL, INTERACTIVE SEARCH RESULTS
A 3D globe gives a visual representation of each school’s proximity to the parent’s home, or to compare school locations to each other. It’s easy to spin the globe to get a better view, and to zoom in for more detailed maps of a specific region.
ADVANCED FEATURES
Parents are able to save and name multiple searches for later reference, or to edit a search to generate new results. In addition, they can print lists, descriptions and comparisons of schools in which they are interested.
Using the same application engine, FutureMedia also developed an application that parents may use to find SSAT test-taking locations. This allowed SSAT to deploy two powerful, user-friendly search applications within a single, efficient development timeline.
