Redesigned three high-priority advising experiences, a guided routing flow, and a 90+ component design system, reducing the decisions students make before booking from four to zero.
Overview
Students had to understand how UC Berkeley’s advising is structured before they could get help from it.
L&S is UC Berkeley’s largest college, and its advising site supports everything from appointments to petitions and deadlines. But students had to navigate unclear advising distinctions, hidden options, and buried eligibility requirements just to figure out where to go for help. I redesigned three high-priority advising experiences, a routing flow, and the component system behind them, grounded in 261 survey responses and usability testing.
Design System
A 90+ component system with best-practice standards, built through AI assistant workflows, which is what made 600+ prototype interactions feasible to build and put in front of stakeholders.
Appointments & Advice
Services grouped into clear sections, with College vs. Major/Minor advising compared side by side and special cases surfaced upfront.
Virtual Front Desk
Two overlapping drop-in services consolidated into one, leaving students with a clearer choice between quick help and a scheduled appointment.
Routing Flow
A guided flow asks students about their situation and recommends the appropriate advising path instead of asking them to choose a service themselves.
Impact
What changed for students.
4 → 0
decisions before booking. Students previously had to figure out which type of advisor they needed. The new flow asks about their situation and routes them from there.
2 → 1
drop-in services. Testing made me question why students were choosing between two services that ultimately used the same intake form and Zoom link, so I combined them.
1
issue caught in testing. 7 of 8 students thought an empty calendar screen meant the page was broken, which I was able to address before launch.
Want to know more?
The designs are internal to UC Berkeley and not public, so I can’t show the screens here. I’m happy to walk through the research, the routing decisions, and what testing changed over a call.
diyamahapatra@berkeley.edu →
