College of ACES, University of Illinois · 2022–2023
ACES Program Explorer
I designed and led an interest-based Program Explorer that helped prospective students browse a growing academic catalog without needing to understand the college’s department structure first.
Three Pressures Converged at Once
The catalog was ready to grow
A 2022 Investment for Growth award brought $1.7 million in campus funding to the ACES Learning Innovation Lab and new online courses. Those courses could stack into certificates and master’s programs, and the catalog was set to expand quickly.
16 certificates, on its way to 43
Students searched by interest, not department
Admissions and in-person recruiting kept surfacing the same gap: prospective students talked about interests such as business, animals, sustainability, and food, but the site only let them browse by department.
Department-first navigation
It had to double as a recruiting tool
Marketing and Prospective Student Days needed a majors-only view to put in front of prospective students, without commissioning a second build.
Reusable for recruitment
The Explorer Needed a Model Built for Scale
- 9
- Departments
- 126
- Program options
- 16 grew to 43
- Certificates
- 6-8
- Months to launch
I Designed the Experience and Directed the Build
To turn that direction into a working product, I designed the interaction model from wireframes through responsive behavior and content requirements, then directed two engineers through implementation.
That included the program cards, filter and sort behavior, in-experience detail views, and the structured Drupal requirements behind them. There was no formal product manager, so I also framed the problem, shaped the research, aligned nine departments, and made the tradeoffs needed to ship.
One Program Record Powered the Whole Experience
One design decision did the most to make the Explorer durable: I defined a structured Drupal model so a single program record supplied its card, filters and sorting, detail view, related-program relationships, and calls to action. The catalog could grow without hand-maintaining disconnected versions of the same content.
Try it: Interactive wireframe prototype - five clickable discovery flows.
The same record also powered marketing pages
I also made that record configurable, not just reusable. For a Prospective Student Days campaign, I embedded a majors-only version on the landing page and hid minors, certificates, and graduate programs without rebuilding the Explorer. The same system I designed became a focused recruiting surface in a second context, with no new build.
Research Made the Taxonomy a Shared Decision
I treated the field signal as a hypothesis, not a conclusion. Card sorting and tree testing checked whether the categories matched how prospective students looked for programs; a physical mapping workshop made cross-department relationships concrete enough for department leaders and the Dean to decide together.
The research also surfaced a content-accuracy gap: two programs were presented as majors on public pages while officially remaining minors during a multi-year university reclassification. The Explorer could not resolve that governance process, but the discovery work caught the discrepancy before the interface repeated it.
- Major×interest matrix: Explore the matrix.
- Interactive program-system views: Four views of the program system, including the list problem, the interest-to-major relationship map, the department-by-interest structure matrix, and a sortable catalog.
Accessibility Shaped the Interaction Model
I treated each program card as a single interactive element to reduce screen-reader verbosity. In a design review, my accessibility peers caught a filtering defect: every selection reloaded the page and sent keyboard and screen-reader users back to the top.
I owned the remediation. I defined the interaction fix, tested it, and directed the two engineers who implemented AJAX filtering, so results update without a page reload, focus is preserved, selections persist through browser back and forward, and the result count is announced.
A Model That Scaled with the Catalog
The Explorer handled substantial growth without a redesign. Certificate offerings nearly tripled, from 16 to 43 inside a 126-option catalog. The same model powered a majors-only view for recruiting and is still live three years later.
The discovery signals point the same way. A saved tree-testing task showed 96% of participants reaching the right program area on the interest-based structure, and a GA4 path report recorded 11,055 Explorer sessions with users moving deeper into program areas. Neither establishes causation, but both give directional evidence that the model supported program discovery.
The ACES approach also influenced a comparable program-and-course repository shared between the College of Education and Gies College of Business. It was a separate build, shaped through many conversations between me and their web lead.
I don’t overstate it. Privacy rules prevented tying Explorer usage to applications or enrollment, so I make no conversion claim. If I were measuring it today, I’d pair UX signals like task success and related-program click-through with operational ones like reduced advising load and the redesign work the structure kept avoiding.
Related Materials
- Figma slide deck: Program Explorer.
- Interaction prototype: Five clickable discovery flows using representative content.
- Figma design file: wireframes and interaction design.
- Major×interest matrix: Explore the matrix.
- Interactive program-system views: Four views of the program system, including the list problem, the interest-to-major relationship map, the department-by-interest structure matrix, and a sortable catalog.