CASE STUDY
UX CAPSTONE · UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN · SI 487 · 2023 - 2024
U-M Student Life
Students weren’t using the Student Life site. They were using Google.
OVERVIEW
A semester-long capstone with a real client: the Division of Student Life at Michigan, the group behind CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services), dining, housing, recreation and campus events.
They had already hired a consultancy, The Understanding Group, which identified seven areas for improvement. Our team took three of them: build a template portfolio for the units, design templates that tell Student Life stories, and create consistency in how themes appear across sites. We narrowed the audience with the client to undergraduates specifically, rather than trying to serve students, parents, alumni, faculty and staff at once. The goal was to give undergraduates one place to find what Student Life actually offers, and to make the individual unit sites look and behave like parts of the same division.
THE PROBLEM
01 — Students didn’t know what Student Life included.
Research showed students weren’t aware of the units under the Division. The connection between Student Life and CAPS, or Student Life and dining, wasn’t visible anywhere.
02 — The navigation labels didn’t match how students searched.
The existing categories weren’t pointing people toward the resources they actually wanted: counseling, health services, dining, career help.
03 — Every unit’s site looked like a different product.
No shared template, no visual connection, nothing telling a student these were all part of the same division.
Our working Figma file
The persona that guided our decisions.
HOW WE TESTED IT
The treasure hunt
The part I’d point to. Rather than asking people to use our prototype and rate it, we ran a preference test with elimination.
Participants got three tools: Google, the current Student Life site, and our Figma prototype. We gave them a real task, find dining resources, find CAPS, and let them choose any tool. Each round we removed whichever tool they had reached for, forcing them one step closer to the prototype.
It measured the thing that actually mattered: not whether our design worked in isolation, but whether it could beat Google.
Asked to find dining, participants went straight to Google and typed “umich dining”. Not the site. Google. When finally routed to the prototype they found it clear and direct, because the icons described the destination. One participant said it reminded them of Wolverine Access, the portal Michigan students use for registration and records. That was a good sign. It meant the layout already felt like something they knew how to use.
WHAT THE FEEDBACK CHANGED
Six cards, not more.
The client was shown two sketches, one with many cards and one with six. They chose six. A one-stop-shop only works if you can scan it, and more options would have recreated the original problem.
A Recommended Actions bar above the cards.
Added after peer feedback, for students who already know what they want and don’t need to browse.
We deleted the blue container.
The cards had been sitting inside a blue box. Someone asked what it was for and none of us had a good answer. Removing it opened the whitespace and made the cards read as larger, more clickable targets. Best change we made, and it came from being asked to justify something.
Pop-ups instead of more pages.
Peer review flagged that reaching a resource took too many clicks. We added overviews in a pop-up with one clear call to action out to the unit’s site.
The logo goes home.
Users couldn’t reliably get back, so we made the Student Life logo clickable from every unit page, which also reinforced the connection between the division and its units.
The redesigned Student Life template.
WHAT WE DIDN’T BUILD
A way for the units to manage their own pages.
We designed all of this from the student’s side. For it to work in production the units would need a way to manage their own pages inside the template, and we never designed that part. It was out of scope for one semester, but it’s the piece that decides whether the units can actually keep their pages up to date once the project is handed over.