MAP

The Student Center is where every University of Michigan student plans and executes their academic life: adding and dropping courses, checking schedules, reading transcripts. The students we spoke to during brainstorming were frustrated with nearly all of it, from registration to basic navigation. The system caters to power users through a dynamic information architecture, and moving between its interfaces is unintuitive.

My role: as a course project, every team member owned every step of the process. I also ran our meeting agendas and led the redesign of the wireframes and the Figma prototype.

To understand both the pain points and the technical constraints, we ran two sets of interviews, one with students and one with U-M Information and Technology Services, plus a survey, an interaction map with a heuristic evaluation, and a comparative analysis of other universities' systems. Students told us what was broken. ITS told us why it was hard to fix.

Before settling on a concept we assessed a range of strategies for technical feasibility. A ground-up rebuild would be the best long-term answer, but it isn't the most cost-efficient one, and ITS had made clear how slow it would be. A browser plug-in that restyles and restructures the existing Student Center was the fastest way to ship a minimally viable solution that scales.

The Student Center has too many pages, and the hardest part of the redesign was cutting steps without cutting function. Modifying a class schedule, for example, put each action on its own tab. We collapsed those four pages into a single Backpack/Registration view: pick a term, search and add classes to your backpack, and see your registered schedule, all without leaving the page.

We planned the release in three phases, ordered by our survey data. Registration is the highest priority for students, so the first six weeks cover Browse, Planner, Backpack/Registration, and My Academics, everything needed to build a schedule. A four-week second phase covers the rest, and a final four weeks adds faculty features.

The plug-in is quick, cheap, and scalable, and the changes it proves out can be reused when a new system is eventually built. It also has real design flaws we called out rather than hid.

MAP ended the semester as a full Figma prototype covering home, My Academics, class search, and registration, backed by student and stakeholder research and a phased plan to ship it. The lesson that stuck: the best design is sometimes the one that can actually be deployed this year.