Path@Penn Redesign

A self-directed UX redesign of UPenn's academic planning portal

Path@Penn is the University of Pennsylvania's primary portal for course registration, schedule planning, and degree tracking — a tool every student relies on each semester. Despite its central role, the existing experience is plagued by a dense, fragmented interface that makes course planning harder than it needs to be, particularly for first-time users navigating registration for the first time.

This project was a self-directed effort: no client, no team, no brief. The goal was to take a platform students use out of necessity — not by choice — and redesign it into something genuinely useful, intuitive, and cohesive.

A platform that works against its users

The core frustration with Path@Penn isn't a single broken feature — it's the cumulative friction of many small failures. Through informal conversations and personal experience, four recurring pain points emerged:

• Dense, information-heavy interface — the portal surfaces too much at once, making it hard to focus on what matters during a specific task.
• Fragmented workflows — completing a single task, like adding a course to your schedule, spans multiple pages with inconsistent navigation and no clear thread connecting them.
• Unclear registration feedback — after attempting to enroll in a course, it's often ambiguous whether the action succeeded, failed, or landed on a waitlist, and why.
• Reliance on external tools — students routinely turn to Penn Course Review, Penn Course Plan, and even spreadsheets to fill gaps the portal leaves open.

"I use like four different apps just to plan my schedule. Path@Penn is the last step — I don't actually use it to plan anything."

Grounding the redesign in real student behavior

Before touching Figma, time was spent understanding how students actually use the platform — not how they're supposed to. This involved a mix of observational walkthroughs, informal interviews, and auditing the existing UI against established usability heuristics.

Key insights from the research phase:

• Most students have a mental model of "browse → plan → register → track" — but Path@Penn doesn't map to this flow in any clear way.
• The degree audit feature is functionally hidden for most users, despite being one of the most important long-term planning tools.
• Registration feedback (seat availability, time conflicts, prerequisites) is buried in text — not surfaced at the moment it's needed.
• First-year students especially reported feeling "lost" upon opening the portal, unsure where to start.

These findings shaped a clear design direction: restructure the portal around the actual mental model students bring with them, not the backend database architecture it currently reflects.

From lo-fi structure to high-fidelity prototype

The design process followed a deliberate progression: define the structure first, then refine the visual execution.

Early sketches and lo-fi wireframes focused on information architecture — deciding what lives where, how sections connect, and how navigation should signal progress. Multiple layout concepts were explored before settling on a four-section structure that mirrors the way students think about planning:

• Dashboard — a personalized home with upcoming deadlines, semester progress, and quick actions surfaced prominently.
• Course — a search-first interface with live filtering by requirement, schedule, and instructor, with course details expanding inline.
• Schedule — a visual weekly view where courses can be added, compared, and confirmed, with conflict detection in real time.
• Degree — a clear, visual audit of graduation requirements, showing exactly what's completed, in progress, and still needed.

Mid-fidelity prototypes were tested informally with peers — asking them to complete specific tasks (find a course, add it to their schedule, check their degree progress) while thinking aloud. Feedback was used to simplify the navigation, improve the visual hierarchy on the Course and Schedule pages, and make the registration confirmation state far more explicit.

High-fidelity designs were built in Figma with a consistent component system: shared type styles, color tokens, and reusable UI components that kept the four sections visually cohesive despite their different content structures.

Four sections. One cohesive planning experience.

The final prototype delivers a fundamentally different experience from the existing portal — not by adding features, but by reorganizing what already exists into a structure that actually matches how students plan.

The redesigned portal reduces the number of clicks to complete core tasks, surfaces registration feedback directly at the point of action, and gives students a single, trustworthy place to understand where they stand toward graduation — without needing a separate app.

This project deepened an interest in systems-level design: not just making individual screens look good, but making the connections between screens — and between features — feel intentional and clear.