SETLIB
Streamlining academic workflow through intelligent content organization
Role
Product Design Intern
TOOLS
Figma
TEAM
3 Designers
5 Engineers
Project Manager
TIMELINE
June - September 2025
(3 Months)
Due to NDA restrictions, I cannot share interface designs publicly. Instead, I’ve focused on sharing my design process, collaboration methods, and impact. Please reach out and I’d be happy to walk through more of my designs in a private conversation.
Description
I collaborated with UW Tacoma's School of Engineering & Technology (UW SET) through a three-month internship.
As a Product Design Intern, I joined a cross-functional team tasked with solving a critical inefficiency in computer science education. The university provided technical resources, stakeholder access, and problem space expertise while my team drove the design and development process from conception to delivery.
The project focused on reducing facilitator prep time by organizing 17 years of curriculum materials into a unified, searchable system.
Seminar facilitators (undergraduate TAs) are compensated for 10 hours per week, with only 4 hours allocated for course preparation outside the classroom. These facilitators must create unique worksheets for each seminar by manually searching through years of scattered Google Drive folders and repository archives dating back to 2007. 90% of their preparation time was spent hunting through chronologically organized archives that didn't match how they actually needed to find content.
This five-step process consumed over 4 hours of facilitators' limited weekly preparation time:
The mismatch between chronological organization and topic-based searching forced facilitators into this inefficient manual process rather than content creation.
Problem
The university needed a functional database system that could centralize scattered materials into a single platform.
The project was positioned as a production tool to replace the existing folder-based system entirely. The bare minimum requirement was delivering a working database capable of importing questions directly from the archives, making them accessible through a single interface.
Beyond the core functionality, the solution needed to streamline the worksheet creation workflow that had frustrated facilitators. While no performance benchmarks were established upfront, the expectation was to create a system that worked better than manually hunting through chronologically organized folders.
Our solution required three core requirements to replace the existing system.
The project needed a complete system overhaul rather than improvements, requiring both systems design and user experience design to succeed.
The existing folder structure doesn't identify relevant materials efficiently, wasting facilitators' and professors' valuable time.
The current system has submissions organized by academic calendar, but facilitators must invest considerable time navigating the hierarchical structure to find relevant content. Unfortunately, the system provides no search capabilities or filtering during discovery, forcing manual review of hundreds of files. This results in wasted preparation time for everyone involved.
The current system spans three organizational levels (year, quarter, and week), with most relevant content scattered across a wide range of academic years and quarters.
Solution
My team and I proposed a centralized database with a dashboard that integrates seamlessly into the existing workflow.
Through research and iterative design, I built a solution with my team that utilizes modern search technology to enable content discovery based on keywords, topics, difficulty levels, and content types. The search-driven system integrates into the original workflow while dramatically reducing time spent on content discovery.
Our design strategy centered on three key insights from user research: facilitators think in topics rather than timeframes, they need immediate content preview capabilities, and they require flexible assembly tools that preserve academic formatting standards.
The technical challenge was making 17 years of inconsistently formatted content instantly searchable. We implemented a tagging system that automatically categorizes questions by keywords and synonyms (topic, difficulty, content type) during the import process.
For example, when facilitators search "data structures," they get relevant content regardless of whether files use that exact terminology. This approach reduced false negatives that littered the previous system.
We emphasized clarity and discoverability to ensure facilitators and professors could locate materials significantly faster, even under time constraints.
The interface prioritizes scannability and cognitive load reduction through clear visual hierarchy and contextual suggestions. Search results display comprehensive previews, difficulty ratings, and usage history to support informed decisions.
We designed the interface based on the faculty's needs rather than standard database structures.
The streamlined creation process allows facilitators to build worksheets through drag-and-drop functionality.
The creation workflow addresses formatting inconsistencies by applying styling templates while maintaining the integrity of technical content like equations and code.
We built preview functionality directly into the worksheet creation process because facilitators needed to iterate and test before submitting their worksheets. This eliminated the trial-and-error approach that previously consumed significant preparation time.
The system provides lightweight collaboration tools that build communication directly into the workflow.
Interviews with professors revealed that they wanted oversight capabilities but found the current communication process tedious. We designed a streamlined approval system that operates directly within the worksheet creation environment. Professors can review drafts, leave feedback, and approve materials without switching between multiple tools or platforms.
This approach came from observing how the communication process caused facilitators and professors to often avoided/limited quality assurance. By embedding collaboration tools within the primary workflow, we eliminated the friction that previously discouraged collaboration.
Results
Our solution delivered significant measurable improvements to the worksheet preparation process.
The university had hoped for meaningful preparation time reduction, but our solution delivered an 81% improvement in worksheet creation efficiency. Additionally, facilitators completed tasks 40% faster overall, and the productivity gains are projected to result in $35,000 in annual labor cost savings.
Testing involved 8 facilitators completing identical worksheet preparation tasks both with and without SETLIB. Baseline preparation averaged 4.2 hours; using SETLIB averaged 0.8 hours (81% reduction). Annual cost savings calculation: 12 facilitators × 40 weeks × 3.4 hours saved per week × $21.57/hour = $35,202.
The quantitative improvements reflected a deeper workflow transformation. Facilitators said they moved from weekly stress about preparation to focusing more creatively on curriculum design, shifting their attention from managing files to developing actual educational content.
My Role
I led design strategy, information architecture, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver a comprehensive workflow solution for academic content management.
I drove the full user experience design from initial research through final implementation. My contributions spanned strategy, system design, and technical specification development.
In addition to conducting stakeholder interviews and design synthesis, I spearheaded the interface design process by creating role-based dashboard experiences tailored to facilitator and professor workflows. I also designed the search architecture to accommodate diverse query patterns and mental models discovered during user research.
Much of my work centered on translating complex document structures into intuitive user experiences while balancing technical constraints.
Research
My team and I conducted comprehensive interviews with facilitators and professors to understand the current workflow challenges and identify opportunities.
Through interviews with academic faculty, we mapped existing preparation workflows and documented pain points in the content discovery process. The research revealed that facilitators spent disproportionate time on manual searching rather than educational content creation, validating our focus on workflow optimization as the primary design challenge.
After analyzing interview findings, we identified key themes around time constraints, content discoverability, and quality assurance gaps that informed our solution strategy:
By examining the existing system, I gained insights into content organization patterns and identified opportunities for intelligent categorization systems.
I conducted and analyzed a content audit across the 17-year archive, documenting file naming conventions, folder hierarchies, and content relationships that could inform automated tagging and search algorithms. This analysis revealed inconsistent organization patterns that reinforced the need for a unified search approach.
Through workflow documentation, I identified specific friction points in the current preparation process that our solution could address.
I mapped the complete facilitator workflow from initial content needs through final worksheet assembly, noting time spent at each stage and opportunities for streamlining. This analysis quantified the preparation time problem and validated our focus on search and discovery improvements.
These challenges of poor information architecture and weak communication structures became the foundation for shaping our solution.
Ideation
All design decisions were evaluated against one central question: Will this reduce preparation time while maintaining quality?
This framework led us to prioritize search functionality and content organization over collaboration features, since efficient content discovery addressed the most significant workflow bottleneck. We preserved advanced collaboration features for future implementation phases.
Facilitators were losing valuable time digging through archives, and our goal was to help them locate and assemble materials in minutes rather than hours.
Drawing inspiration from products like Typeform and Notion. We envisioned an interface that felt lightweight, structured, and easy to navigate.
Our early concepts centered around a dashboard that guided users toward key actions:
Inserting new questions into a database
Browsing a centralized question bank
Building worksheets
Managing multiple sections through a facilitator workspace
Since our stakeholders included both professors and facilitators, we also designed two complementary experiences, ensuring that each role had access to tools that aligned with their responsibilities.
These early concepts merge into three fundamental design decisions that would guide our solution architecture:
Our research insights directly informed a reimagined worksheet creation process that eliminated the most time-consuming steps from the original workflow.
The current process consumed facilitators' limited preparation time through inefficient navigation and manual searching. Our design approach centered on transforming this, workflow into a streamlined experience.
We mapped the ideal user journey based on facilitator mental models discovered during interviews: direct content access, immediate preview capabilities, and integrated assembly tools. This revealed that the most significant time savings would come from eliminating steps 2-4 of the original process entirely.
This eliminated manual navigation steps while integrating collaboration directly into the creation process. Our ideation focused on restructuring the complex workflow into the simplest, most efficient path.
Validation
Faculty validation confirmed that our redesigned workflow addressed the core preparation challenges effectively.
Before further design, we validated these workflow concepts through stakeholder feedback sessions with faculty members. Facilitators responded positively to the simplified flow, particularly the elimination of folder navigation and integrated search capabilities. This confirmed our design direction and formed the foundation of our solution.
The iterative design process required continuous stakeholder collaboration to translate validated concepts into functional implementation.
The validation phase led into a design and development process where we iterated on the solution through continuous stakeholder feedback. While I cannot share the specific design iterations due to confidentiality agreements, this collaborative refinement process taught me valuable lessons about balancing user needs with institutional and stakeholder constraints. These insights have fundamentally shaped my approach to complex design challenges.
Reflection
SETLIB changed my understanding of how system design impacts scalability and organizational efficiency.
SETLIB has changed how I approach design problems. Before this project, I thought about designing features in isolation. Working on SETLIB taught me to think in systems by understanding how each component affects every other part of the experience.
Most importantly I learned to design for unknown future requirements. When we built the database architecture, I had to consider not just current facilitator needs, but how the system might evolve over years of use. What happens when the university adds new courses? When content formats change? This systems perspective forced me to create flexible foundations rather than rigid solutions.
Working across design, engineering, and academic stakeholder groups taught me to communicate design value in terms that resonate with different audiences.
I learned to present design decisions using metrics rather than visuals by tailoring my message to each audience. Presenting with metrics and common terms rather than mockups helped build their alignment and trust.
Going forward, I want to keep practicing this balance: designing with empathy for users, advocating in terms of organizational value, and grounding decisions in measurable outcomes. That balance is what makes design work not just thoughtful, but durable.
For a closer look at my comprehensive design process, please explore my other work.