2017-29: Rename "Personal Information" Page to Demographic Information and Re-order Application Flow

Problem / Issue

Recent research findings, as well as negative comments submitted in the post-submission CCCApply Student Satisfaction Survey, and other anecdotal reasons, suggest that students perceive the questions on the Personal Information page to be invasive, intrusive, and not relevant to the admission application process. They feel disrespected by certain questions (Sexual Orientation, Transgender, Race, Ethnicity, etc.) and the majority of the negative comments pulled from the student satisfaction survey pertain to the personal information page questions in CCCApply.  

The Personal Information page is presented to the applicant early in the application process. following the enrollment page, which currently appears at the beginning of the Standard and International applications. At the time the Personal Information page appears, students have not yet invested much time or energy in the application process. If they feel disrespected by "invasive" personal questions, they are abandoning the application here.  

Proposed Solution

The CCC Chancellor's Office has asked CCCApply and the CCC Technology Center to conduct research and data analysis of the Standard Application to better understand user behavior and preferences in order to gather requirements and propose changes to the application workflow design for efficiencies, to minimize unnecessary questions and remove barriers.  

Some of the research and data analysis completed over the past six months include:

• Conducted detailed analysis of all submitted Apply applications since 2012 (5 million) looking at start times compared to submit times to calculate average "Time to Completion"
• Same detailed analysis provided insights and data calculation of "Abandonment Rate" 
• Same analysis provided data on the last page that users touched before abandoning the Application
• Infiniti Machine Learning Data Analysts conducted data analysis on the post-submission Student Satisfaction Survey data fields (Experience, Recommend, Comments)
• Same research project pulled out all <comments> and performed cluster analysis on all comment text
• Same research project drilled down on "negative" comments put into word cloud and analyzed by
• Research projects underway to identify which questions in Standard Application are required based on state, federal, and local MIS laws and regulations to provide level setting baseline for Noncredit application requests.
• Research performed by in-house data analyst to identify duplicates in total OpenCCC Accounts (5M) 

One suggestion that has emerged - based on research data (% of applicants abandoning the App on the Personal Information page) is to rename the Personal Information page to "Demographic Information" page and move the page further down in the application process, thus hoping that students - who will have more invested in the application investedprocess  so that studuents will have more invested in the application and will not . By renaming the page to "demographic" information, Also, suggestion to move the personal/demographic info questions to later in the application process, so that by the time the user gets to this page

Proposed Change Requirements

Rename the Personal Information page to "Demographic Information" to minimize the impression that the questions asked are "personal" in nature. These are actually demographic questions.

Re-order the position of the new Demographic Information page to later in the application workflow (between the Residency page and the Needs & Interests page) to minimize the number of students abandoning the application process after investing time and energy into completion.

Notes

See various research notes (to be added). 

Supporting Documentation