Catalog, Grades, and Enrollment
CONTEXT
Berkeleytime is a platform used by 45,000+ students at Berkeley to browse and discover courses. The site allows students to look up course statistics from previous semesters, view current enrollment trends, and average grade distributions.
ROLE
UI Designer
DURATION
September 2025 - Present
TEAM
2 Designers
1 User Researcher
5 Engineers
TOOLS
Figma
PROBLEM SPACE
Our team is currently in the process of transferring our old site onto a new beta website.
I collaborated closely with a team of engineers to make improvements to the 3 most used pages by students.
As one of two designers, I mainly focused on maintaining a clean website, but also designing new features that would improve clarity during the course enrollment process.
FINAL DESIGNS
Recently Viewed Courses
Students can now view courses they've last interacted with in previous Berkeleytime sessions.
Reserved Seating Overview
Students can now check at-a-glance which courses may have reserved seats for their major.
Grades and Enrollment Minimized View
Students can now look at a course's grade and enrollment distribution through the Catalog tab.
INITIAL OBSERVATIONS
We conducted an audit of our beta site to identify problem areas
By identifying friction points, we pinpointed where interactions felt clunky or unintuitive. This helped us move from surface-level complaints to specific design improvements grounded in user behavior.
PAIN POINTS
Users need continuity
Preserving context using data from previous sessions makes the user experience feel seamless.
Prioritizing ease
Users gravitate toward easily scannable interfaces where information is quickly understandable.
Key Insight: Users completing information-heavy tasks prioritize ease and functionality above all.
They value continuity across sessions and interfaces that reduce cognitive load, making information quick to scan and understand so they can focus on decisions rather than the interface.
DESIGN PROCESS
Recently Searched Feature
Students can’t revisit previously viewed courses, breaking continuity and making schedule planning feel like starting from scratch each time.
I conducted some initial research on current solutions for empty recently searched states, but ran into a major problem:
Where should the recently searched courses appear?
Embedded in Search
Updated in Catalog
After exploring both options, I decided to place Recently Searched within the catalog. Students can quickly revisit a class they looked at before while still seeing the broader course information around it, keeping everything in one place.
Recently searched items are often embedded in search bars that autofill with dropdown results, but our search updates the catalog cards directly. Integrating it into the catalog maintained consistency with that interaction pattern and felt more seamless within the existing design.
