Transforming research into a cohesive student portal experience.

The research was built to find friction, not just confirm it. I made a point of hearing from prospective students who chose another university, to learn where the portal lost them, and from participants with accessibility needs, so the design held for the full cohort rather than the average user.

To keep the critique grounded in principle rather than opinion, I evaluated both legacy portals against Nielsen's ten usability heuristics before synthesising everything into one lifecycle journey map. That map became the team's shared reference, the artefact decisions kept returning to as the design took shape.

Consolidating two portals meant deciding, screen by screen, what was genuinely shared versus unique to one system, then shaping a single architecture that carried both without inheriting the clutter of either.

Designing inside Salesforce Lightning set the constraints, so I built with its components where they fit and documented custom patterns where they did not. The handover specs captured the conditional logic developers needed, like a section appearing only for certain applicant types, so the build matched the intent and nothing was lost in translation between design and development.