A digital platform redesign that clarifies complex course planning and encourages exploration.
Making academic planning more intuitive by reducing cognitive load and simplifying constraint navigation.
UX/UI Design
User Research & Synthesis
Interaction Design
Product Thinking
Figma
FigJam
User Interviews
Usability Testing
Carta is Stanford's official course search and planning platform used by 95% of undergraduates. Carta V1 was first created by the Stanford Pathways Lab to research how students make course decisions. Students who used the platform agreed to partake in these experiments and benefited by seeing aggregated course data that was not available anywhere else. However, as a research project Carta V1 was built over a single summer and was not designed with scalability in mind.
So, in fall 2018, the Carta V2 team – an entirely student-led organization – was formed with the goal of recreating the platform prioritizing speed and scalability. In winter 2020, the beta version of Carta V2 was launched with much excitement from the student body!
Now, the Carta team is creating an even more functional Carta V3 that is designed to meet the needs of the student body as expressed through extensive interviews and user-testing. While V3 is in development, our team is working closely with the Registrar’s Office to ensure that the Carta V2 platform can continue running smoothly since 95% of undergraduates use the platform.
Our goal is to create a platform that helps students plan their educational careers at Stanford.
The Carta V3 team is comprised of three sub-teams – Frontend, Backend (& Infrastructure), and Product Design. Each team has a lead, and cross-team collaboration is common. We have in-person weekly work sessions where we work collaboratively and build community.
I applied and was accepted to the competitive Carta Product Design team in March of 2021, focusing on user research and User Experience & User Interface (UX/UI) design on Figma. I quickly learned Carta's design approach from a team of five other talented, agile designers, and in my first quarter on the team I took on several projects – redesigning the Home Page, User Profiles, Independent Study Course Page, Feedback Form, Header, and Footer.
I became the Design Systems Manager in January 2022, maintaining existing design system components and building new ones to ensure a consistent, efficient design across the platform.
I took over leadership of the Carta Product Design team in March 2022, leading a team of other designers. As past team members have graduate, I've recruited several new designers and taught them our industry-standard design process. It's been so exciting to lead this team working on a product that the Stanford student body uses regularly, making change on a product that I'm so familiar with.
Carta helps students make the most of their Stanford experience, crafting tools to maximize their knowledge and realize their potential.
One of my responsibilities throughout my time at Carta has been to evaluate and communicate the importance of new features for the platform while balancing the needs and capabilities of our engineering teams. For example, we've ideated social features for Carta like having "friends" who users can share and compare 4-year-plans with. However, because of the difficulty of building a feature like this, it is lower priority. To keep track of past, current, and future projects and their importance, I've utilized a Trello Board and prioritization matrices like the one below.
We want to make the course search and planning process as efficient as possible for busy students.
Since our team of students has relatively high turnover, we have a fairly regulated design approach to achieve our goals with a thorough process and high-quality output. On Figma, we follow this page structure for each project:
Sketches, comparator studies, journey maps, affinity mapping, user research etc.
Grayscale UX iterations – minimalist wireframes
Iterations optimizing visual design and UI using the Carta Design System (named Wayfinder), designing for edge cases (error states, empty states, tooltips, tutorials, onboarding, unpredictable content)
Suggesting new UI components to add to the Design System if needed
The final version spec’d out for frontend
This is an iterative process, so we jump between wireframing, user testing, and critiques so that we're constantly improving by learning from users' and team members' experiences with the product.
Right now, I'm working on paring down the platform for an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version that will be built in the near future. I'm working to consolidate pages into a simpler layout that's faster to engineer. This version will still include our most important features – Saved Courses, 4-Year-Planner, searching with robust filtering, individual course cards and pages, data, and reviews.
Simultaneously, I'm redesigning the 4-Year-Planner to integrate with our new designs.
Stay tuned for updates on the next version of Carta!
