Stanford Bulletin

Stanford's academic landscape is rich, complex, and poorly served. For years, students, advisors, faculty, and staff navigated it through a fractured set of tools that had accumulated over decades rather than been designed as a system.

Three tools had become redundant, outdated, and actively harmful:

Graduate Academic Policies & Procedures (GAP) — a standalone policy repository disconnected from course and program information, difficult to navigate, and out of sync with how students actually look for guidance.

Explore Courses — the authoritative class search tool students found so unusable they built third-party replacements around it. Already being replaced by Navigate Classes, but still operating in parallel and creating confusion.

Explore Majors — a separate tool for degree programs, disconnected from course search and policy information, forcing students to cross-reference multiple sources to understand what a major required.

The result: students routinely went to departmental websites instead of the official Bulletin — because the official source of truth had become too fragmented to trust. The mandate was clear: eliminate these tools, consolidate everything into one authoritative platform, and design it to actually serve students, advisors, faculty, staff, and anyone anywhere in the world navigating Stanford's academic landscape. The Bulletin is the third phase of Completing Connected Curriculum — after Navigate Enrollment replaced Axess and Navigate Classes replaced Explore Courses — and eventually all three will merge into one unified platform. I am designing toward that future with every decision made today.

The core design framework applied across the Bulletin is the same Bite, Snack, Meal progressive disclosure model established in Navigate Classes — adapted for the Bulletin's role as authoritative reference rather than discovery engine.

A Bite is the minimum viable signal — enough to decide whether to look further. A Snack is a preview state that surfaces key details without leaving the browsing context — where most decisions actually happen. A Meal is the full detail page — the complete official record, fully structured and legible for the user who needs everything.

This framework shapes every section. It respects that a prospective student scanning programs has different needs than an advisor checking a specific prerequisite, which are different from a faculty member reviewing an official record — and all three should be served by the same interface at the depth they need.

The old Bulletin Courses section was a dropdown-filtered text list presenting 15,875 classes with no visual hierarchy and no way to evaluate a class without clicking through to a separate page.

The new Courses section introduces the Bite/Snack/Meal structure. The Bite is the course card in search results: course code, title, brief description, key metadata at a glance. The Snack is an expanded preview state — prerequisites, units, grading basis, typically offered terms — without leaving the results view. The Meal is the full course detail page: the complete official record, every field structured and immediately legible.

The critical architectural decision was distinguishing the Bulletin's Courses from Navigate Classes — both show course information, but they serve different intents. Navigate Classes is where students discover and explore. The Bulletin is the authoritative record. The same user, two different moments, two different information needs — reflected in information density, interaction depth, and content priority.

Courses has been fully designed, user-tested on the hi-fi prototype, and submitted for development.

The current Bulletin program pages reveal the problem through their structure, not their absence of content. Take the Biology BS page — chosen because it represents a heavy-content program, the kind that stress-tests any information architecture. The page has a hero image, but it's a generic Stanford campus photo with no connection to Biology specifically. Program type is embedded in the title string — "Biology (BS)" — with no visual tagging. More critically, the current Bulletin doesn't surface subplans at all. A student trying to find subplan options within a program has nowhere to look — the information simply doesn't exist in the current system.

Degree requirements are present but the structure compounds the problem. Everything is buried in an accordion-within-accordion pattern — folder inside folder — with no visual differentiation between levels of nesting. A student trying to understand what the Biology major requires has to click through multiple layers of identical-looking accordions with no hierarchy to guide them.

The new Programs section redesigns this experience from the information architecture up. The information architecture is organized around three levels of engagement. The Bite is the program card in search results: a field-specific photograph, colored type tags that visually distinguish Major, Minor, IHN, and Subplan — including surfacing subplans the current Bulletin doesn't show — and the program name. Filtering by program type, department, interests, and degree means students can narrow 349 programs to a relevant shortlist in seconds.

The Snack is a preview state that surfaces key program attributes — degree type, school, unit requirements, and a short description — without navigating away from the results view. This is where a student comparing two programs can make a first cut without committing to a full page read.

The Meal is the full program detail page — structured with a persistent left-side navigation (About the Program, What You'll Study, Meet Our Faculty, Degree Requirements, Admissions, Advising, Courses) and a right-side jump-to anchor menu for long-form content. The degree requirements — previously buried in undifferentiated nested accordions — are now structured with clear visual hierarchy: top-level requirements visually distinct from nested sub-requirements, so the structure of the degree is legible before a student starts reading the details. A student who visits the new Biology page knows immediately what they're looking at and where everything is — without reading a word.

The most challenging design problem in the entire Bulletin was the Requirements page — degree requirements are deeply nested, vary significantly across programs, and must be both authoritative and scannable. Initial designs were too dense for students to parse quickly; simplified versions lost the precision faculty required. I used UX Pilot for rapid design exploration, generating and evaluating multiple structural approaches before converging on an accordion-based solution that uses visual differentiation between levels — so students can navigate the hierarchy rather than excavate it.

Programs is fully designed and currently in usability testing with approximately 10 students, faculty, and staff per round.

The old Policies page was an alphabetical A-Z link list — no categorization, no search, no indication of what a policy covered before clicking. A student trying to understand their options around grade appeals had to scroll through dozens of links hoping the title was self-explanatory.

The key design direction I set for the new Policies section: organize by student context rather than alphabetical title. Group policies by the situations students actually encounter — rather than forcing them to know the official name of a policy before they can find it. The Accordion Suite component handles the inherent complexity of policy content: layered, nested, requiring progressive disclosure to stay readable.

Policies is currently under development with SWS leading the build, under my design direction and review.

The old Departments page was a plain alphabetical bullet list — department names as links, nothing more. No context, no structure, no way to understand what a department offered.

The new Departments section moves to a card-based layout with left-side filters — the same structural pattern as Programs. This consistency is deliberate: a student who has learned to navigate Programs will immediately understand Departments because the interaction model is identical. The design challenge is significant — departments vary enormously in size and scope — so the component system must serve a small humanities department and a large engineering school equally well without either feeling like a poor fit.

Departments is currently in design, with SWS leading the build under my direction.

User research draws on multiple institutional studies conducted across Stanford's student, faculty, and staff communities. Given privacy constraints, specific findings and participant data remain confidential. What the research consistently confirmed: current tools are unclear, inconsistent, and most harmful to those with the least institutional support to compensate.

Usability testing has been conducted at each design milestone — approximately 10 participants per round. Courses was tested on the hi-fi prototype before development. Programs is currently in testing with students, faculty, and staff. The most significant testing-driven iteration came from the Requirements page: the tension between student scannability and faculty precision drove multiple rounds before the accordion approach resolved it. The design does not move to development until testing confirms it solves the problem it was built to solve.

AI played a meaningful role in research synthesis. I used Grain's AI-assisted analysis to identify themes across sessions involving three distinct user types simultaneously — compressing multi-day synthesis into focused analysis while preserving the judgment calls about what findings meant for design. I used Claude to structure usability testing discussion guides and synthesize research themes across sessions.

The work is producing real outcomes before the September 2026 launch. Courses has been fully designed, tested, and submitted for development. The hi-fi prototype for all four sections is complete. The Completing Connected Curriculum Design System is live in Storybook and being used by SWS developers today.

When the full Bulletin launches, 2M+ annual views will shift to a platform designed around how people actually look for information. Three redundant tools will be eliminated. And the unified platform that merges Bulletin with Navigate Classes and Navigate Enrollment — work beginning in the coming months — will give Stanford students something that has never existed: one place to discover a program, explore its classes, understand its policies, and enroll.