Count the clicks: auditing common student tasks

Checking a financial-aid balance, finding a registration deadline or submitting a form should be routine. Too often it takes more steps than withdrawing cash from an ATM: a login wall, a portal landing page, a menu that assumes you know which office owns the task, a PDF, and a form that does not work on a phone. Each step is small. Together they decide whether a student finishes the task or gives up.

Why small friction becomes a real barrier

Every extra step is another point where a student can get lost, time out or hit something their device or assistive technology cannot handle. Students working full-time, first-generation students and students using screen readers feel that friction first — and a task abandoned halfway usually shows up in the data as inactivity, not as a problem to fix.

How to run the audit

• Pick one common task — checking an aid balance, registering for a class, requesting a transcript.
• Start where a student would, often a search engine or the homepage, not an internal link.
• Count every click, login, redirect, download and form field until the task is done.
• Repeat it on a phone, then keyboard-only, then with a screen reader.
• Note every point where you had to know which department owns the task to move forward.

What to fix first

Look for steps that exist for the institution rather than the student: duplicate logins between systems, landing pages that only link onward, instructions locked in PDFs, and handoffs between departments that the student has to navigate. Removing one of those usually does more than redesigning the page around it.

Next step

Pick one task this week and count the clicks. If you wouldn't want to use it, send it our way and we'll help you map the journey and find the steps that can go.