April - July 2025
Using research and product thinking to fully re-imagine Quest's course selection process
Context
Quest is the University of Waterloo's information system used by students to manage all personal information with the school. Every term, over 40,000 Waterloo students use Quest to select and register for their courses for the upcoming semester. However, there are always discussions around the school about how frustrating Quest is to use.
As a student myself, I set out to uncover what made the Quest so frustrating and designed a working prototype to fully re-imagine what a good course selection experience looks like.
These are two snapshots of Waterloo's Quest information system:
Skills
Design thinking
Product thinking
User research
Project type
Personal project
Redesign
Team
Solo
Research process
I made sure that the users were at the core of the solution through research. `I used insights from user surveys, keyword search, and market analysis to inform my solution.
Secondary research
Used keyword search on the University of Waterloo's official Reddit page to discover problems
User surveys
Sent out surveys to 10 Waterloo students of various disciplines understanding problems related to course selection
Course information is scattered across multiple official and unofficial university websites. Makes it difficult to gather information.
“I’ll always have so many tabs open and would lose track” ~ Waterloo Student
The various websites available for students
More research
To design a solution that truly worked, I needed to understand where in the course selection process these frustrations occurred and what solutions (if any) already existed.
This chart showcases each pain point within each step and the most common websites used for each step of the user journey,
What did I learn from this?
Using the market analysis, I realized that creating an entirely new product would just add to the overall clutter of information available. That's why I opted for a re-design instead.
Students have to constantly switch tabs planning out different course timings in their schedule. (Hint hint: This insighted the core feature of simutaneous viewing in the re-design)
Product requirements
For each pain point and outlined by my user journey map, I created a list of features that would solve their corresponding pain point to ensure that my solution was user-centred.
Overview of my Notion paged used to organize my product work
Sketching and ideating ideas
This list of features helped me begin ideation where I sketched and conceptualized each of these ideas. During this stage of the process, I filtered out what to include and exclude for the final solution.
(Feel free to contact me if you want to learn more!)
Design
After experimenting and exploring different ideas, I began work on the prototype. During this period, there were many design decisions that ended up influencing the final product.
Click arrows to see before and after
In one of my early iterations of my prototype, one of my colleagues pointed out how the timeline felt like it didn't affect the whole page. In my final version, I fixed this issue, adjusting the information architecture of the whole page.
The course card component was really important for researching and navigating different courses on the website. Here how I used these goals to evolve the design of the component.
Be skim-able
Students should be able to skim over information quickly.
Be informative
Information should be useful enough to help users make decisions.
The final solution
Overview of the finalized solution and features:
Feature 1
Research, and visualize your schedule simutaneously
This new version of Quest is very interactive and allows you to make updates to your calendar in real time.
Feature 2
Prevent yourself from taking courses that you can't take
Any pre-requisite or timing conflicts are highlighted and shown to the user clearly to prevent them from taking it.
Feature 3
Search for courses with smart filters
Users can search and filter through courses by program, pre-requisites and more.
Reflection
This was a huge project with a lot of considerations, but by no means is it finished or perfect. Here are some of the things I would do if I had more time.
Validate my designs and decisions, with real Waterloo students and understand how I can improve the designs of the project.
Quest is a huge website that doesn't which isn't just limited to its course selection system, If I had more time, I would fix the whole website.
For my solution, I focused largely on students for the users, next I should really consider how to design the solution with the University admins in mind.
Reflection
This project was a huge learning experience for me as a solo designer, taking responsibility of all parts of the design process. Heres my biggest learnings.
Designers have many methodologies, tools, and frameworks to solve problems, but I learned you shouldn't use them just for the sake of using them. You should methodologies, tools, and frameworks to inform decisions that make sense in the context of the project.
With design, I find that there is a million ways to go about solving a problem, which for me can become very overwhelming. I found that writing down my thoughts and reflecting not only helped me complete this project, but serve as useful documentation to look back on.
Thanks for reading :)
