Berkeleytime
Berkeleytime is UC Berkeley’s largest course enrollment platform, serving over 45,000 students. In a recent survey, students reported small inconsistencies across the platform’s web and mobile interfaces as we prepared to launch the beta version. To address this, my team defined a design system to bridge gaps between design and frontend implementation, ensuring a more cohesive UI across all pages ahead of our beta release this fall.
Role
Design Systems Designer
Timeline
12 weeks; Summer 2025
Team
5 Product Designers
1 Engineer
My Role
How might we design a 0→1 accessible mobile app that helps individuals with disabilities exit homelessness by connecting them to essential services?
Impact
“You guys don’t even know how much this is gonna help people out here, just having something like this could really change lives.” GSS CEO
Context
Frustration between Designer Developer Handoff
As part of UC Berkeley’s strategic effort to integrate AI into administrative workflows, our team began by gauging staff sentiment toward AI—uncovering both their concerns and the potential they saw in these tools.
We then evaluated River, the university’s new beta AI assistant, through user testing. While the goal was to empower staff, early feedback was alarming: the tool was perceived as confusing, unintuitive, and overly technical.
Conclusion
The Payoff
User Research
Dealing with an ambiguous problem space
I learned a lot about how to distill a specific user need from a broad, ambiguous problem space. I began with the vague goal of “improving enrollment,” but the breakthrough came when I narrowed in on specific, high-effort student behaviors that revealed an important, solvable problem.