Little Language Models

Challenge

A tech company connecting students to PhD fellowship funding opportunities received thousands of email inquiries weekly asking questions already answered on their fellowship program website. This created a significant burden on staff who spent hours daily responding to duplicate inquiries instead of reviewing qualified applications. The fellowship program pages weren’t meeting user needs, and the company needed to understand why.

Discovery

I conducted a mixed-methods discovery process combining analytics review, stakeholder interviews, and content best practices research. I analyzed traffic patterns, page visits, search terms, and user behavior to form hypotheses about why users weren’t finding answers. Then I designed a content testing plan using UserFeel to validate which navigation labels, information architecture, and copy variations actually worked for users.

Approach

I created two versions of the fellowship program page and tested them with carefully screened participants (Master’s Degree requirement). Four participants tested each version, completing tasks like:

• Finding the application deadline
• Determining eligibility requirements
• Understanding what to include in an application
• Assessing eligibility for unrelated fields (Applied Statistics)

Participants rated task difficulty (1–5 scale) and explained their reasoning, revealing where they expected information and why they got stuck.

Key findings and changes included:

Navigation Term	Finding	Action
Fellowship Details	Vague; participants didn’t realize this contained core application requirements	Renamed to Eligibility Criteria for clarity
Application Dates	Effective; participants found deadline quickly	Kept as-is
Available Fellowships	Effective for task completion, but ambiguous about target audience	Rewrote intro and section to clarify tech-adjacent focus
How to Apply	Missing entirely; participants struggled to find application steps	Added to navigation with clear, actionable copy
Funding Details	High user interest but buried	Added to navigation as dedicated section
FAQs	Last item on page; most participants never scrolled there	Removed section; incorporated frequent questions (international eligibility, undergrad funding) into relevant sections like Eligibility Criteria and Funding Details

Impact

Email volume	Dramatically reduced thousands of weekly duplicate inquiries
Staff efficiency	Freed up hours daily previously spent answering already-answered questions
Application quality	Team could focus on reviewing qualified candidates instead of handling support emails
User experience	Participants completed key tasks accurately and quickly with the redesigned content

Additional improvement: A motion designer created a how-to video outlining application steps across platforms (website, email, SurveyMonkey).

Client feedback