Hilltopper Home Tour
A dual-interface virtual recruitment experience for Marquette University High School — built during COVID with a COPPA-compliant anonymous login system I designed from scratch.
The Challenge
When COVID lockdowns hit, Marquette University High School lost their entire recruitment pipeline overnight. Their process depended on in-person campus tours — a high-touch, high-conversion experience that simply couldn't happen anymore.
They came to us with a clear anxiety and an open brief: we can't bring families to campus, so how do we still make them fall in love with it? The easy answer was a virtual tour. We didn't do the easy answer.
Student Experience
Kids are the real decision makers — not parents. We needed to engage them first, in their language, on their terms. That meant gamification, avatars, hidden prizes, and zero friction to enter.
Parent Experience
Parents need information, trust, and process clarity. A parallel experience — less gamified, more editorial — that activated automatically once a student pulled their parent in through the reward system.
Technical Architecture
Anonymous Login System
Kids couldn't give us personal data — legally. So I designed an autogenerated anonymous login that saved progress without any identifying information. No email required. Just a memorable password.
Parent Handoff Trigger
Dual Interface
The Gamification Layer
Students navigated a 360° interactive campus tour with testimonial videos embedded at each location. Hidden prize hotspots throughout each room accumulated into a running score — a scavenger hunt layered over a school tour. A profile page let students build a personal avatar with customizable skin tone, hair, face shape, and MUHS-branded outfits that mirrored the real swag they were earning. Physical prizes redeemable at completion: hats, t-shirts, hoodies.