Academic Catalogs
—A modern twist on the academic catalog to allow students to easily find program and course information
Project Summary
The restructuring of the undergraduate and graduate catalogs was a massive undertaking that required a lot of teamwork. The degree and program listing table is simple and effective, as well as easily embeddable on any of our internal pages. The course catalogs pull real time data from our friends at ITS, allowing students to get up to date information on specific courses. The catalog PDF, which once took weeks of manual labor, now can be created programmatically in less than a day.
Dynamic Courses Catalog
Courses are pulled in, in real time, from ITS servers. Users can filter by a number of different options, including: subject, term, course attribute, or keyword.
Degrees and Programs Listing
A sleek, clean table that utilizes identifiable icons to show degree availability. This table can be filtered by the user, or embedded with various variations.
Catalog PDF
This PDF is pulled from several data points throughout the site and compiled. This semi-automated process saves weeks of labor time annually.
Fully Responsive
It’s kind of a must nowadays, right?
Desktop
Laptop
Tablet
Mobile
Device vectors made by Macrovector
Challenges
This project seemed to have an abundance of moving parts. We needed to organize the detailed data in a single source location, as well as communicate with ITS for API endpoints we were going to need. Moving past the data, we spent quite a bit of time figuring out the best way to display the data. There is a ton of information be presented, and we needed to find various ways for users to be able to quickly find the information they needed.
Solutions
Communication. We were only able to organize this system, and for it to be effective, because we were able to effectively communicate between teams, and departments. On the interface side, we went through several working variations of each system before settling on the ones we liked. It was a lot of trial and error. Things that sounded good on paper, didn’t work out so well once implemented. We also had to deal with unforeseen issues, such as API load time, and figure out clever ways around it.