Product Design · UX Systems
Designing a unified student experience across a fragmented platform ecosystem.
Time
|
8-week engagement · 2025
Role
|
Product Designer
Team
|
This Waay UX, Product, Engineering
Context
Why Portico Needed Redesign
Portico unified four established EdTech products — Campus Ivy (financial aid), CourseKey (student success & attendance), Verity IQ (CRM & SIS), and Trajecsys (clinical tracking) — into a single student experience platform.
How do we bring all these tools together within Portico?
While powerful individually, the lack of shared navigation, workflows, and visual language created a fragmented experience for students—especially those navigating the platform for the first time. As Portico began selling as a true end-to-end solution, the student experience needed to feel cohesive, intuitive, and supportive rather than disjointed.
Project Brief
This project focused on defining how the student journey should flow—from first login through academic completion—so that every new student feels confident, oriented, and supported from day one.
The work balanced long-term vision with near-term execution, ensuring that immediate design decisions aligned with Portico’s future as a single, unified platform.
Strategic Goals
Defining the roadmap for Portico's unified student experience platform
1
Define the Integrated Student Experience
Create a clear, opinionated vision for how Portico's tools work together as one cohesive student journey.
2
Enable Near-Term Execution
Deliver actionable design guidance that could inform Q4 initiatives while supporting a long-term transition to a single-app experience by 2026.
Evaluation
To understand where friction existed across the student journey, we conducted cross-platform usability reviews and heuristic evaluations across Portico’s mobile and web experiences. This surfaced inconsistencies in navigation, default states, guidance, and progress visibility that made it difficult for students to understand what to do next.
Key Insights
Defining Portico’s unified student experience
While individual tools performed well in isolation, students lacked a clear mental model of the platform as a whole. The strongest experiences shared three qualities: clear default states, visible progress, and guided next steps. These became the foundation for the future experience.
North Star Vision
We defined a north star experience centered on a single, cohesive student journey—where navigation, progress, and communication work together seamlessly across platforms. This vision aligned teams around a shared direction while leaving room for phased implementation.
Skill Logging & AI Acceleration
Skill Logging & AI Acceleration
Skill logging is one of the most frequent—and most complex—tasks students perform. I worked on streamlining this experience by aligning flows to industry standards, consolidating steps, and reducing cognitive load.
To further support students, an AI-assisted flow was introduced to accelerate skill logging through pattern recognition and voice input—helping students complete required tasks efficiently without sacrificing accuracy or compliance.
Progress Visibility & Feedback Loops
Making Progress Visible and Motivating
Progress views were designed to give students a clear, high-level understanding of where they stand—while allowing them to drill into details when needed.
By combining visual indicators, structured metrics, and familiar patterns, the experience helps students stay oriented, motivated, and confident in their path toward completion.
Global Messaging & Communication
Unifying Communication Across the Platform
Messaging was consolidated into a single, global experience—bringing notifications, updates, and institutional communication into one predictable location.
This reduced fragmentation, clarified message priority, and ensured students could easily find important information without searching across multiple tools.
Outcomes & Impact
This work provided Portico with a clear strategic foundation for unifying its student experience—aligning teams around a shared vision while delivering practical guidance that could be implemented incrementally.