Langara College Academic Planner
Empowering students through strategic UX foundation and collaborative design
HIGHLIGHT
Langara College's "Plan with Confidence" initiative transformed academic advising through strategic UX foundation work that centralized resources, simplified navigation, and established clear information architecture, enabling students to navigate their academic journey with greater clarity and confidence.
ABOUT PROJECT
The project addressed student confusion around course planning and program requirements. Working within institutional constraints and across departments, I helped create the strategic foundation that guided external implementation while ensuring alignment with student and institutional needs.
I collaborated as UX designer for Langara College's Academic Planner, collaborating with the Academic Quality Assurance team to establish foundational UX strategy for this academic advising transformation.
MY ROLE
While the final UI and implementation was handled by an external agency, I was responsible for the critical foundational work that shaped the user experience strategy:
- Conducted discovery sessions with students and academic advisors to understand pain points and map existing user journeys
- Restructured content organization and navigation patterns to reduce cognitive load and improve findability
- Mapped core user journeys for key scenarios including pathway exploration and course progress tracking
- Developed student-friendly language guidelines to demystify academic terminology and processes
- Ensure compliance with institutional requirements, as part of the Academic QA department team
- Provided ongoing UX and QA guidance and to the external development team throughout implementation
CHALLENGE
How might we design a digital experience that empowers students to confidently plan their academic path while reducing institutional support burden?
Students at Langara were struggling with fragmented, confusing
academic planning resources. Research shows that 6 in 10
students experience difficulty enrolling in classes they need to
meet requirements, highlighting the widespread nature of
academic navigation challenges.
Core Problems Identified:
- Students couldn't easily find program requirements or understand prerequisites
- Unclear academic timelines and progression routes to graduation
- Students unsure which advising services to use and when
- Advising resources scattered across multiple systems and touchpoints
- Academic terminology and processes felt intimidating and unclear
DEFINING PROBLEM
Understanding what prevents students from successfully navigating their academic journey while balancing institutional efficiency needs.
The challenge required creating a solution that would reduce
advisor workload for routine inquiries while improving support
quality for complex student needs—transforming how academic
planning information was organized and communicated.
Our focus centered on Langara students across all programs who
needed clearer access to course planning and degree requirements.
Internal data revealed high volumes of ambiguous
inquiries that could be resolved through improved
tools and better information architecture.
DISCOVER - RESEARCH INSIGHTS
I conducted comprehensive stakeholder research through student interviews, advisor sessions, content audits, and journey mapping to understand the academic planning ecosystem at Langara.
- Students felt overwhelmed by complex, scattered academic information
- Students lacked confidence in academic decision-making due to unclear planning information
- Critical information in lengthy documents across multiple pages
- Advisors spent significant time on routine questions that could be self-served
DESIGN STRATEGY
Reduce complexity through strategic information architecture while building student confidence in academic decision-making.
The strategy focused on creating a simple and intuitive support system organized around user intent rather than institutional structure, enabling self-service while providing clear pathways to human support when needed.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE & CONTENT STRATEGY
I restructured the academic planning ecosystem from department-centric organization to a student-journey-centered approach.
Architecture Optimization:
The new structure prioritized common student needs while maintaining comprehensive information access.
Content & Language Design:
Developed comprehensive guidelines that replaced academic jargon with ambiguous language, focused on
actionable guidance rather than restrictions, providing contextual help through descriptive content.
SOLUTION
The Academic Planner is a visual tool that helps Langara students map their complete program journey through personalized course sequences. By answering a few questions about their chosen credential, students receive a clear pathway showing which courses to take and when, including prerequisite requirements. This helps students arrive at advising sessions better prepared with specific questions, reducing confusion and creating a more effective advising experience.
COLLABORATION & IMPLEMENTATION SUPPORT
Cross-Functional Partnership
Worked closely with Academic Quality Assurance department to ensure all content and flows met institutional compliance requirements while maintaining user-friendly experience.
Agency Collaboration
I served as the primary UX liaison with the external development team, ensuring design decisions aligned with our established user research and strategic foundation. This involved reviewing proposed solutions against documented user needs, maintaining our strategic language guidelines throughout implementation, and providing usability guidance for interaction design and accessibility considerations.
PROJECTED IMPACT
MY LEARNINGS
Strategic Foundation Work Drives Long-Term Impact
This project reinforced that effective institutional UX often happens in the foundational phases rather than final implementation. The strategic information architecture, content strategy, and user flow design, had lasting impact on the student experience and enabled the external agency to focus on innovative solutions rather than solving basic organizational problems.
Facilitating Cross-Stakeholder Alignment Through Design Strategy
Working closely with Academic Quality Assurance and the external agency taught me to balance user advocacy with institutional requirements while facilitating effective cross-team collaboration. As the UX designer bridging these stakeholders, I learned that successful institutional projects require translating user research insights into strategic direction that both the Academic QA team and external developers can align with. The most effective solutions emerge when design thinking guides early decision-making, ensuring user needs drive the strategic foundation before technical implementation begins.
