Empowering students to discover courses
Role
Product Designer
Team
Just me!
Timeline
5 weeks
Tools
Figma, Google Forms
The Brief
How might we make course selection less of a guessing game?
This problem came from experience. I was in the middle of registration myself—juggling CTEC tabs, texting multiple friends, even finding myself in Reddit threads—and realized I do this chaotic ritual every single quarter. So, I asked: what if the peer advice students already rely on actually lived somewhere useful? I tackled this problem in 5 weeks, through a class called DSGN 241: Wireframing and App Design Basics.
Motivation
We already have to review courses — why not make it worth it?
Every quarter, Northwestern students are required to fill out CTECs just to view past evaluations. We're already doing the work — but the output is generic, rushed, and unhelpful. Apps like Beli, Letterboxd, and Goodreads turn reviewing into something people actually want to do by making it social, low-friction, and built around taste. If students are already evaluating courses every quarter, why not design something that captures what they actually want to share and makes it worth engaging with?
Context
Students are already doing this, just badly.
Every quarter, Northwestern students cobble together course decisions from Fizz and Reddit threads, group chats, impromptu conversations, and half-hearted CTEC reviews. The advice is out there—it's just scattered, inconsistent, and gatekept by who you happen to know. I surveyed 15 students to get a firmer grasp on how others were navigating this process.
Validation + Insights
Students and official tools have a fundamental mismatch in what they're looking for.
People want depth, not scores.
CTECs and the course catalog cover logistics like time slots, requirements, and capacity. But they miss what 93% of students actually prioritize: teaching style, workload reality, and what the class is really like.
Insight from friends matters more.
67% trust peer recommendations as much as or more than official evaluations. But that trust is limited by your social circle.
Sharing feels risky.
73% said they worry about influencing others negatively. They want to contribute, but they just don't want to be wrong publicly.
The Problem
The information students care most about is the hardest to find.
The best course advice lives in the heads of students who've already taken the class. But right know, that knowledge only flows to people who know the right people.
Mapping the structure
Drafted Architecture
With research in hand, I moved into Figma to start defining features. I translated core user goals into feature buckets and mapped them into a site map, clarifying the app's structure and making sure every feature earned its place.
Sketching the experience
With many directions still on the table, I turned to low-fidelity wireframes to distill and prioritize. Sketching helped me focus on what was essential and stay realistic about a five-week timeline.
Back to the drawing board
My first IA was built on assumptions. Once I started wireframing real task flows, the misalignments showed up fast—redundant pathways, features that sounded good in theory but didn't hold up in practice. I revised the structure around three key changes.
I merged redundant navigation sections, reorganized flows around key tasks, and redefined post types that felt too narrow. "Discovery" and "question" posts became "course enrollment" and "study group" — more flexible and more usable alongside course reviews. I also cut a "groups" feature entirely after it added complexity without earning user interest. The goal was always the same: keep it lean, keep it useful.
Establishing the visual direction
With the app's structure and functionality locked in, it was time to set the visual tone. I started by pulling together moodboards to explore different directions — looking at various app concepts, social platforms, and campus tools to find the right balance between playful and trustworthy.
From the outset, I gravitated toward blue. It felt like a natural fit for an app rooted in trust, community, and academic context. Blue carries associations with reliability and clarity, and it avoided competing with Northwestern's purple branding while still feeling campus-appropriate. I paired a soft periwinkle with clean whites and warm grays to keep the interface approachable and lightweight. My intuition was to design something that felt calming, and something students would actually want to open.
Solution
Course selection powered by the people you trust.
Review courses with the information that matters.
Rate overall experience, teaching style, and workload: the details students actually search for but can never find. Add your honest take, tag the course, and choose to post publicly or anonymously. Every review feeds directly into course discovery, building the peer-powered resource that doesn't exist yet.
Profiles that build trust.
I designed the profile to include course history, friends, and activity in one place, placing the context that makes a recommendation from you meaningful.
A home that knows your quarter.
Your current courses, trending classes in your network, and quick access to search and friend activity.
Reflections
Validation comes from people, not ideas.
Designing and owning a product meant I couldn't stop at the concept—I had to constantly bring it back to users. Repeated testing surfaced the gap between what I assumed students like myself needed and what they actually valued, pushing me through several meaningful iterations.
Process over just "pretty."
Working solo made it easy to focus on aesthetics, but I learned to prioritize process and usability over polish. A layout that feels intuitive to me as the designer doesn't guarantee anything for users. Only testing does!
Good ideas need systems to scale.
My biggest challenge wasn't designing features, but making sure they were valuable and that students would use them consistently. Given more time, I'd focus on incentives, prompts, and feedback loops to drive retention beyond the initial novelty.
Curious to see more?
This case study covers the highlights. I'm happy to walk through my deeper process over a call. Feel free to reach out to me at maijaboelkins2027@u.northwestern.edu!