Case Study · LeapScholar
Writing a Statement of Purpose is one of the most consequential tasks in a student's study-abroad application — and one of the least supported. I came into this problem knowing nothing about the domain, did the research to understand what was really hard about it, and designed a guided SOP experience from the ground up.
Design the SOP flow experience for a student who is just beginning to write their Statement of Purpose and wants to complete it over 2–3 weeks. Along the way, an assigned counsellor will provide feedback.
That's it. No existing product to react to. No prior design to deconstruct. Just a student, a counsellor, and a high-stakes document that could determine which university admits them.
Before I could design anything, I needed to understand what a Statement of Purpose actually is, who reads it, what makes one strong versus weak, and where in the application process it sits. I spent several hours mapping this — not as a box to check, but because designing a workflow I don't understand is a reliable way to design the wrong thing.
What I learned: the SOP is a deeply personal essay — part academic argument, part professional narrative, part persuasion — submitted to multiple universities, often with different word limits and thematic requirements. There's no universal format. Students typically write 3–5 versions. And the feedback loop between student and counsellor is the moment where the real work happens.
With a working model of the domain, I turned to the people who actually go through this. I defined two primary recruiting criteria: people currently applying to study abroad, or people who had already done it and written their own SOP with professional help.
I also drafted a discussion guide before approaching anyone — not a rigid script, but a set of open questions designed to surface the anxiety, the workarounds, and the mental models that don't show up in product specs. Questions like: How did you plan your SOP? What help did you take? What do you wish someone had told you?
I spoke with Sravya Cherukuri — an Indian student who had just completed her MS at Conestoga College in Ontario after applying through a consultancy (i20 Fever). She'd written four SOPs in total across different universities, which made her exactly the kind of informed participant I needed: someone who had been through the process and could tell me what was actually hard, not just what felt hard in the abstract.
Her process was improvised: the consultancy sent her a few past SOPs from other students, she modified those to fit her own story, and ran the result past a customer success person over email. No template. No guidance on what each section should accomplish. No clarity on how much depth was appropriate for any given point.
One detail that stuck: a friend of hers had an application rejected specifically because of an unclear SOP. That wasn't an abstract risk — it was a lived consequence in her immediate social circle, which shaped how seriously she took the process.
After the interview, I mapped what Sravya felt, thought, said, and did — to look for gaps between what she believed and how she behaved, and to identify the emotional texture of the problem.
The most telling pattern: there was a widespread abdication of ownership. Students paid a consultancy, assumed that meant the SOP would be handled, and were then surprised to find themselves largely on their own. The consultancy provided templates and a light review — not the scaffolding students actually needed.
Seven findings shaped the decisions I made in the design phase:
With the research synthesised, I moved into structure before screens. The IA mapped the full SOP journey across three phases: planning (understanding requirements, outlining the narrative), writing (drafting, section by section, with contextual guidance), and review (counsellor feedback, revisions, finalisation).
The counsellor touchpoint was the design's spine — every decision about what the student sees and does was informed by when and how their counsellor enters the loop.
I worked through three fidelity levels in the time available — low-fi sketches to validate flow logic, medium-fi to lock the structure and interactions, then two passes at high fidelity. The first hi-fi pass was solid on interaction but fell short on visual quality. Rather than ship something I wasn't satisfied with, I gave it a second pass to raise the bar on craft.
The final screens cover the student-facing writing experience: an onboarding flow that explains what a strong SOP includes, a planning workspace where the student outlines their narrative before writing, a section-by-section editor with inline guidance, and a review view that makes counsellor comments visible and actionable without switching context.
This was a time-constrained assignment — 16 hours across four days — and the constraints were productive. Coming in with no domain knowledge forced the research to be real, not performative. The interview with Sravya gave me something concrete to design against, and the empathy map turned that conversation into a set of durable principles.
What I'd do differently with more time: interview a wider sample, including students who hadn't used a consultancy at all, to pressure-test whether the same friction points held across different applicant profiles. I also left out success and error states, which matter in a multi-week, high-stakes flow where progress can stall. Prototyping would have surfaced those gaps earlier.