Awesome_E Redesigning and leading the development of a 4-year course planner and discovery application
ICSSC’s Project Committee aims to create useful applications for students and provide them with opportunities to improve professionally, socially, and academically. I work on PeterPortal, and our team meets every week to discuss sprint updates, ideate new features, and check in with one another. Being a part of this team helped me not only contribute to a meaningful project but also work with others to find how we can best apply our strengths to work most efficiently.
PeterPortal’s Course Discovery Interface
Over the course of 6 months, I was able to give code and design feedback to others as well as introduce new features to PeterPortal. I started in the winter of 2024 with smaller tasks (such as bug fixes and adding Captchas) to familiarize myself with the project’s stack, but soon after that I merged a PR to let users import data from their transcript into their current 4-year plan.
Additionally, I built upon the work of previous contributors and finished a previously stale (over a year old) PR that lets users create multiple 4-year plans. It required familiarizing myself with code that others had written, understanding how it interacts with the app’s data layer, and applying fixes and updates to the UI to make it consistent and easy to use.
Like other projects I’ve worked on, I wanted to make PeterPortal easier to use and improve the consistency in its design. I started a Figma Design and worked on creating a UI that’s both visually pleasing and functional. I started by making the navigation elements more consistent with one another, then continued onto redesigning the 4-year planner (the “Roadmap” page, see screenshot above), some of which is yet to be fully implemented.
Because of my involvement in the project, I was promoted to project lead for the 2024-2025 school year, and I will continue to organize the code base, designs, and tasks because individual contributors, both inside and outside of the Project Team, are the reason that we can maintain a quality project that students use year after year.