Laurel Springs.
I took a scattered, hard-to-navigate course catalog and turned it into one centralized experience families could actually use. It's now a top navigation item and one of the top 5 most visited pages on the site.
The catalog redesign I ran solo
This was a solo project. I owned everything from research through QA, working with a developer, a Director of Web Product Marketing, and the Laurel Springs team. We had two months and we shipped on time.
The catalog went from buried and invisible to a top nav item and one of the most visited pages on a 17K+ page site.
- 1 UX Designer (me)
- Director of Web Product Marketing
- 1 Developer
- Laurel Springs Stakeholders
- Project Manager
The problem: a catalog families couldn't navigate
Courses were buried inside grade-level pages, hidden in dropdowns. If you didn't already know where to look, you weren't finding them. That's a real problem when your entire pitch is your course offerings.
Families shopping for an online school want to browse, explore, and compare. The old structure made all three harder than it needed to be.
- Courses required multiple levels of navigation to reach
- No way to browse across grade levels at once
- Way too much clicking just to explore basic offerings
- Mobile experience was painful
- The structure didn't support exploratory browsing at all
The original catalog experience before redesign.
The brief
- Find courses by grade, subject, or keyword quickly
- Compare course details to make informed decisions
- Access the catalog from any device
- Reduce course-related support inquiries
- Increase catalog page engagement
- Drive more qualified admissions inquiries
How do other schools do it?
Competitive Analysis
I looked at Florida Virtual School, Dwight Global Online, Stanford Online High School, and a few others. I evaluated how they structured their catalogs, how filtering worked, how easy it was to find something on mobile, and how quickly you could scan without reading a wall of text.
Competitive analysis across peer online schools.
A few clear patterns came up across every competitor worth looking at:
Keeping everyone in the loop
I stayed in it with the developer all the way through launch. Not just handing off files and hoping for the best: actually reviewing builds, flagging what was off, and making sure what shipped matched what was designed.
- Cross-browser and mobile QA across all major breakpoints
- Annotated handoff docs with interaction specs and edge cases
- Iterative stakeholder review before final sign-off
- Performance checks on a 17K+ page site
- Accessibility checks for contrast and keyboard navigation
- Post-launch analytics tracking to validate goals
Development review across multiple states and breakpoints.
What shipped
One centralized, searchable catalog. Consistent structure across all grade levels. Filters that actually work. A mobile experience that doesn't make you want to give up.
View Live Site ↗Side filter panel: filter courses by grade level and subject from a collapsible sidebar without leaving the page.
Read more interaction: course cards expand inline to show full details, keeping users in context without navigating away.
Multiple filters and clear: stack filters across categories and clear them all at once, making it easy to reset and explore differently.
From buried to top 4
Before launch, the catalog ranked #11 on the site. After launch, #4. The traffic data backed it up across every metric.
Data from Google Analytics. Before = pre-launch period. After = post-launch period.
What I took away
Sometimes the biggest UX win is just making something exist that should have existed already. The catalog didn't need a redesign. It needed to be a real, findable thing. That shift in framing made every decision easier.
The competitive analysis was more persuasive than I expected, especially with stakeholders. Showing them how other schools solved the same problem gave everyone a shared reference point and cut down on back-and-forth about direction.
Staying involved through QA was worth it. You catch a lot of things that would've slipped through otherwise, and it builds trust with the developer when they see you actually care how it ships.