Updating the advising experience.
Academic advising at Missouri S&T was fragmented across systems that expected students to know how the institution worked. I restructured it as a continuous, guided experience, one place, one journey, one student at a time.
The system was the obstacle.
Students were expected to manage complex academic requirements across disconnected tools, with little guidance, leading to confusion around responsibilities, next steps, and ownership.
The core failure wasn’t usability. It was a lack of clarity and continuity across the system.
What broke down, specifically
Students struggled to find advising info. Content was scattered across multiple sites and systems. The previous advising.mst.edu only served a select group of students, but didn’t make that clear, so students often visited the wrong offices for their needs.
Information wasn’t organized in a way students understood. Content was structured around internal organization (colleges) rather than the way students actually think about themselves (their department or program).
This led to confusion and inefficiency. Students spent extra time searching, wandering, and ending up in the wrong places before finding what they needed.
Lead designer. Also the developer.
Leadership and ownership
I led UX from discovery through implementation. As one of three designers at the university, I was responsible for ensuring the solution was clearly defined, executed, and delivered, and I built the site myself in TerminalFour, the university CMS.
Cross-functional collaboration
I worked closely with faculty, department staff, and advisors to understand the advising process and align on a solution that balanced student needs with institutional requirements.
A research constraint, named honestly
We couldn’t conduct direct research with students, the project ran during finals week, and we deliberately chose not to involve students in the lead-up so they could focus. By the time the semester ended, the window had closed. Future iterations will involve student feedback.
From “improve advising usability” to help students take the right action at the right time.
Improving advising wasn’t about adding more content. It required restructuring the experience to:
- Centralize critical actions and information.
- Guide students through key journeys, planning, registration, graduation.
- Make responsibilities and deadlines explicit.
Help students take the right action at the right time without needing external support.
Two structural moves did most of the work.
1 · Consolidate advising into a single experience
I brought advising resources into one centralized site so students didn’t have to navigate across multiple systems to find what they needed.
2 · Standardize structure across departments
I introduced a consistent structure for advising content to reduce variation between departments while still allowing flexibility where it mattered.
When information stops flowing, change the loop.
After early mockups and a competitive analysis, progress stalled. I didn’t have enough department-level detail to ensure the experience would meet each program’s needs. Many faculty members were hesitant to share details and concerned about the new site, understandable, but it left gaps.
Pivoting the approach
I consulted the VC of Student Success to surface essential advising info that applied to all students. Then I switched to a mockup-first feedback loop: I built a preliminary structure and shared it with faculty, asking them to correct inaccuracies rather than relying on proactive information gathering. That shift unblocked the project while keeping the design student-centered.
Three options, one student-centered choice.
- By College, a broad overview of each of the three colleges.
- By College with Department Links, college-level info linking out to each department’s page.
- By Department, every department listed directly, no need for students to know which college they belong to.
Choosing the best student experience
We organized the site by department. From prior conversations with students, faculty, and staff, we knew many students aren’t aware which college their department belongs to. Department-first navigation eliminated that friction and minimized clicks.
Each department got a dedicated advising page hosted on its own site, linked from the central advising hub. Pages included advisor contact info, advising processes, and forms / important links. Centralized organization with departmental autonomy, a consistent shell, flexible content underneath.
Live and in use.
The site is live at advising.mst.edu. Formal research and usability testing are planned for a future iteration to measure how students are navigating the experience and where it can keep getting better.
What changed, in one sentence.
The biggest shift was moving from a system-centered structure to a student-centered journey.
Instead of expecting students to figure out the system, the experience now guides them through it.
If I continued this work
- Personalization based on student progress.
- Predictive guidance for upcoming requirements.
- Better support for edge cases and non-traditional paths.