Path@Penn

Project
UI/UX Design Class - Path@Penn Redesign

Year
04/11/2023

For Penn students, course registration is the most stressful week of the semester—second only to finals. Every second matters, but Path@Penn forces users to click through unnecessary tabs, hunt for information, and waste time.

But what if Path@Penn worked with students, not against them?

Research & Insight

I began with a central question: what are the main user pain points that slow down the course registration process on Path@Penn?

To explore this, I conducted a Google Forms survey with 15 students and interviews with 5 students who actively use Path@Penn for course registration.

67% of respondents
reported it takes 2–5 minutes to register for a course, while only 13.3% managed to complete it in under a minute.

40% of respondents
expressed dissatisfaction with the tab system by rating it 1 out of 5 on a usability scale from most usable (5) to least (1). Because Path@Penn only supports a single active tab, students must backtrack repeatedly to return to their course cart, slowing down the course registration process.

Additional Findings:

The Degree Audit feature emerged as a source of confusion, mentioned in 9 of 20 responses.
Users often clicked either Search & Register or Add/Drop Courses, but not both.
Users considered the two "Submit Schedule” buttons redundant.

Overall, students agreed that registration could be faster and less stressful if the system:

Removed clutter on the landing page.
Reduced the need to exit and re-enter tabs during course selection.
Merged functionally similar steps in the course registration process.

Iterations

Low-Fidelity Prototype of Landing Page

Feedback from Peers:

Readability
Low contrast between the gradient background and text makes some sections hard to read. Also, due to the gradient, some words rely on background color changes to be readable.

Search Placement
The oversized search bar dominates the page and pulls focus away from primary tasks.

Content Clarity
Long link lists feel dense and are difficult to scan. Reframing them into task-based modules with clearer labels would make actions easier to understand.

Final Prototype

Advanced course registration website - made for university students with utmost attention to their priorities

The first goal was to design a home page that feels cleaner and highlights the features students use most. I prioritized displaying the class schedule first, with an arrow button on the right that leads to the Add/Drop Class feature.

On the sidebar, I reorganized the original six sections into four broader categories — My Profile, Academic, Financial, and Support — consolidating overlapping content and linking directly to the tools students need.

Mobile Redesign

Website Redesign

Next, I redesigned the Section Attributes area to make degree requirements clearer and more actionable. Each requirement category now includes a labeled progress bar that shows how much of that requirement the student has completed, along with the specific section attributes that fulfill it.

With the final prototype, the course registration process becomes more straightforward, eliminating the need to scroll through hundreds of options in the advanced search panel.

Additionally, right before signing up for a course, students now have a clear visual of their current schedule and can see exactly how a selected class fits with the rest of their courses before adding it to the schedule. This reduces the amount of tabs students need to exit out of in order to see what their current schedule looks like.

These changes directly support my earlier goal of creating a simpler, more unified registration flow.

Reflection

Through this process, I was reminded of how valuable peer feedback is in shaping stronger design decisions, and how important it is to establish a design system early on to maintain clarity and consistency as the project grows. I also learned to slow down and think more intentionally about the core problem I’m trying to solve before moving too quickly into visual solutions.

In the future, I’d want to experiment with different ways of presenting key information and actions across screens, and eventually introduce opportunities for students to customize their dashboard based on their preferences and academic needs.