Redesigning UMBC's
Study Abroad Experience
Improving a broken process without touching a single line of code
Improving a broken process without touching a single line of code
When I joined UMBC's Study Abroad Office, I noticed something everyone already felt but nobody had acted on: the process was confusing for students and exhausting for staff. Not because the technology was missing — but because nobody had ever sat down and designed how it should actually work.
My Role
This became my first real taste of UX in the wild: messy systems, tight constraints, and real people counting on the outcome. The challenge wasn't building something new — it was making what already existed finally work.
I needed to understand the problem from both ends before touching anything. I interviewed staff directly and distributed surveys to 200+ students. Only 10 responded — but those 10 responses perfectly mirrored what staff had already told me. That wasn't a research failure. It was triangulation: two completely different groups pointing to the exact same structural breakdown.
200+
Students surveyed
10
Responses — enough to validate staff findings
3+
Terra Dotta views staff juggled daily
Students experienced
Staff experienced
The root cause
"The system had never been configured — it had just been used. Nobody had ever designed the workflow. They'd only inherited it."
The constraint was total: no new tools, no custom UI, no outside systems. Everything had to happen within Terra Dotta's existing configuration options. That forced a kind of discipline — every decision had to be structural, not cosmetic. Two phases, two audiences, one system.
Removed outdated questions, consolidated redundant fields, and reordered steps so the journey felt logical instead of overwhelming. Fewer inputs, clearer labels, no dead ends.
Moved the team fully into Terra Dotta's new Admin Console, restructured materials, and configured automated reporting — replacing hours of manual Excel exports with a single filtered view.
Scattered multi-form entry consolidated into a single, logical flow.
The Classic View was visually overwhelming with no actionable hierarchy. The new Admin Console surfaces what matters — immediate priorities, real-time search, and application status at a glance.
Before this project, generating a list of current applicants required manual parameter setup every single time. By correctly configuring the Applicant Report inside Terra Dotta, staff could generate this view automatically — no setup, no Excel, no waiting. This one configuration change replaced hours of weekly work.
Before this project, all study abroad information lived on a single UMBC webpage — a dense paragraph with a few links. Students had no clear starting point. I designed and built a full standalone website using Terra Dotta's Site Builder, giving the office a proper presence that students could actually navigate.
The site is live at goabroad.umbc.edu — still in use today.
Building this site meant working entirely within Terra Dotta's template constraints — no custom CSS, no component library. The design decisions had to be structural: information architecture, content hierarchy, and navigation clarity over visual customisation.
This project never produced a launch metric or a conversion rate. But the people it affected told a clear story — and in service design, that's often the most honest measure of impact.
Student Experience
Students reported navigating steps more independently after the restructure. The volume of "what do I do next?" emails to staff dropped noticeably — not because students stopped caring, but because the process finally answered the question before they had to ask.
Staff Efficiency
Staff went from juggling 3+ Terra Dotta views to working entirely within the Admin Console. Checking a student's application status — previously a multi-step process — became a single filtered search.
Operational
The Zero Entry Report configuration eliminated weekly manual data exports. What previously took hours of Excel work became an automated, always-current view that staff could pull instantly.
Lasting Presence
The standalone Study Abroad website I built is still live and in use today. It gave the office a proper digital home — something that didn't exist at all before this project started.
"The workflow is so much easier to manage now."
Study Abroad Staff
"Students seem less confused. We're getting fewer panic emails."
Study Abroad Staff
"The constraint wasn't the obstacle. It was the design brief."
Most real UX work doesn't start with a blank canvas. It starts with a system someone else built, for reasons nobody remembers, that real people are quietly struggling with every day. This project taught me that impact doesn't require new tools or new screens — it requires the discipline to look closely at what's already there, understand why it's failing, and reorganise it with intention. Nobody asked me to do this. I noticed the problem, made the case, and saw it through.
"Design the workflow, not just the interface."