IUCAT serves every student, researcher, and faculty member across IU's nine campuses. I led the end-to-end redesign of its Selections & Folders system — turning a confusing, broken workflow into an intuitive resource management experience.
IUCAT is the backbone of IU's library ecosystem — the single place where students, faculty, and researchers search, discover, and request books, journals, and digital resources across all nine campuses.
But there was a problem hiding in plain sight. The "Selections & Folders" system — the primary way users were supposed to save, organize, and manage resources — was virtually invisible. Users confused "Select" for a batch action. The Folders feature was buried. And there was no way to request multiple items at once.
Our team of 7 HCI graduate students was brought in by IU Libraries to fix this — and to rethink how navigation works for the entire catalog.
Through patron walkthroughs and librarian interviews, four critical failure points emerged:
Within our 7-person team, I wore multiple hats. My core focus areas were navigation redesign, accessibility, and ensuring all solutions worked within IU's Rivet Design System.
I led competitive analysis across 8 academic library systems (Stanford, Harvard, Penn State, UVA, Brown, ACM Digital Library, and more), identifying patterns in how saving, organizing, and citing resources could feel natural.
I co-facilitated patron walkthroughs, synthesized findings, created explorative sketches, and was responsible for ensuring the final Figma prototypes aligned with Rivet's component library and accessibility standards.
We interviewed three IU Libraries faculty members — a senior cataloger, a scholars' commons librarian, and an open education librarian. The pattern was consistent: new students feel lost in IUCAT, and librarians spend a disproportionate amount of time answering the same basic questions about how to save and find resources.
One key insight: IU already maintains a robust Knowledge Base with support articles, but almost no patrons knew it existed. This became the seed for our tooltip and Knowledge Base Popup features.
We designed task-based walkthroughs where students had to find, save, and organize library items — without us naming any of the tools we expected them to use. We simply said "save these resources for later."
The results were telling. Users looked for a "Save" button that didn't exist. When they found the "Select" checkbox, they expected it to enable a batch action (like selecting emails). No one discovered the Folders feature without help. And several users couldn't figure out how to request an item at all.
Since IUCAT runs on the Blacklight open-source framework, I specifically benchmarked other Blacklight-based catalogs alongside leading academic libraries. Key patterns I identified:
Visible save counts (Stanford, Penn State). Bookmark/pin iconography with visual feedback (UVA, Harvard, Brown). Save-to-folder from search results (ACM Digital Library). Inline citation tools (ACM, Harvard).
These patterns directly informed our redesigned "Save to Folder" button, the Basket concept, and the new Citation modal.
Our design process deliberately separated wild exploration from system-constrained execution.
Our evaluation wasn't a single gate — it was woven into every sprint. The IU Libraries sponsor attended weekly meetings, and we conducted formal review sessions with the IU Libraries UX design team.
Their feedback directly shaped the design. When the UX team questioned whether "Add to Basket" should appear at the folder level, their suggestion to move it inside the within-folder view led to a cleaner interaction model. When they pointed out that restricted-use items required redirects to external appointment systems, we added a new modal step we'd originally missed.
The UX team's response to our Basket concept was particularly validating — they confirmed that separating saving from requesting was the right paradigm shift and praised the introduction of availability-based grouping.
While the designs are currently in the evaluation pipeline for development, the potential reach is significant. IUCAT serves the entire Indiana University system.
This wasn't a visual redesign. It was a systems design problem — understanding how saving, organizing, requesting, and navigating are deeply interconnected workflows that break when even one piece is unclear.
The biggest lesson: users don't fail; systems fail users. Every "confused" user in our walkthroughs was behaving rationally based on what the interface communicated. They looked for "Save" because that's what every other platform calls it. They expected the checkbox to enable batch actions because that's what checkboxes do everywhere else. The system's language was simply speaking a dialect its users didn't share.
Working within IU's Rivet Design System also deepened my understanding of designing within constraints. Every component had to be buildable with existing patterns or achievable extensions. This forced creative problem-solving — like repurposing Rivet's dialog component for our off-canvas Basket preview.
Collaborating with a team of 7, with a real client, on a live system used by 100,000+ people — that's the kind of complexity that no classroom exercise can replicate. And it's exactly the kind of problem I want to spend my career solving.