- My role: Product Designer
- The problem: Higher education researchers and administrators, some managing decades of critical documentation, had no efficient way to surface records from a large and complex database. The legacy search interface was a single, rigid form that was sluggish and poorly suited to the diversity of institutions and roles.
- Top outcome: A validated search and filtering system featuring customizable, saveable lookup views, tested with real clients, giving users precision control over their records.
Context and scope
Kuali builds software for higher education institutions, serving researchers, compliance teams, students, and faculty. I was the primary designer for the Research product, embedded with a product manager and roughly a dozen engineers in a matrix organization where each designer owned a dedicated product line.
My work spanned the entire design process: user interviews, concept sketching, high-fidelity prototyping, and production CSS. I also contributed to a cross-product initiative to unify the platform’s navigation and design system.
Execution
- Discovery: Conducted recorded user interviews with stakeholders and end users to document pain points, existing workarounds, and workflow edge cases across multiple institutions and departments.
- Concept development: Explored multiple low-fidelity approaches, landing on a dual-mode solution: a traditional omnibar for power users and a custom lookup builder allowing users to define, save, and share targeted views of the database.
- Validation: Ran iterative testing sessions with real users, documenting feedback across rounds. The custom lookup concept landed well with participants, particularly the ability for product owners to deploy role-specific views to their teams.
- Platform extension: The document finder's universal search patterns sparked a broader initiative with the design team, resulting in high-fidelity designs for a shared navigation system, global search, and co-branding framework addressing long-standing requests from multi-product customers.
