Timeline Feb - Nov 2019 (10 months)
Organization Penn Labs
Team Davis Haupt (Team Lead + Developer), Ying Xuan Eng (Developer), Daniel Like (Developer), Shaya Zarkesh (Developer), Daniel Tao (Developer), Charley Cunningham (Developer), Daniel Ng (Business Developer)
My Role User Research, Experience Design, Interface Design, Visual Design
Tools Sketch, Figma, Illustrator, HTML/CSS
Penn Labs is a team of student engineers, designers, and business developers. We build products that improve life at Penn for tens of thousands of students each semester. As part of the Penn Courses team, I work closely with developers to design products that streamline course registration.
In 2017, Penn Labs acquired Penn Course Search, a former Penn student’s side project. At the start of 2019, we initiated a complete interface redesign, back-end rewrite, and rebrand of the product as Penn Course Plan. In October 2019, we launched Penn Course Plan in time for Spring semester course registration.
As the only designer for this project, I was responsible for discovering user needs, designing the new interface, creating a product design system, and handing off detailed mockups to developers.
Course registration is a complicated and tedious process.
When students plan their courses for the upcoming semester, there are many important factors to consider. However, pertinent information is decentralized across many resources.
The university’s course planning software Penn InTouch is notoriously difficult to navigate and forces students to reference external tools. Penn Course Search addressed some of these shortcomings but fell short on critical features and user-friendliness.
Penn undergraduates need a more comprehensive and intuitive course planning tool to simplify the complicated course registration process.