CU Continuing Education
Digital catalog for continuing education courses.
Role
Information Architecture, UX Design, Visual Design
Find your next course.
Whether you need a final credit hour to finish your degree or that Feminist Studies class is calling your name, University of Colorado's Continuing Education program can point you in the right direction. This site redesign had one primary goal: Make it easy for new and prospective students to find the perfect course. The previous site was clunky and difficult to navigate; the school was ready to evolve to a modern, seamless, more intuitive and elegant user experience.
Planning
After initial research, we quickly sketched dozens of homepage workflows but kept coming back to a single goal for every user: Find a class that that fits my specific needs — quickly. That meant guiding users from a large pool of data to a specific piece of information. When looking for a similar funnel in other industries, we drew the closest parallel to travel sites like Airbnb.
We developed wireframes and prototypes, taking cues from these search-based travel sites, and made it easy for users to go from the homepage to a course search filter. Having two initial options — “Choose a Course” and a pre-selected semester — creates a low barrier to entry; the full search interface gives users the option to browse or completely customize their search. The new streamlined design dramatically improved students’ ability to select from hundreds of classes quickly and intuitively.
