Primary users
Undocumented students in California who need to understand whether they qualify for in-state tuition and what steps they can take if they do not.
- User testing
- Research synthesis
- Accessibility review
- Responsive iteration
Social impact
Immigrants Rising
A redesign of California's In-State Tuition Tool to make a high-stakes eligibility experience clearer, more supportive, and easier to navigate for undocumented students.
UX Designer on the redesign team: research synthesis, the review flow, accessibility, trust-building, and responsive form design.
Launched with Develop for Good for a mission-critical education resource.
Project details
Type
Develop for Good social impact redesign
Timeline
October 2024 - February 2025
Role
UX Designer
Focus
Research synthesis · Review flow · Accessibility · Trust-building · Responsive form design
Problem
Clarity and trust were everything.
The original tool was long, dense, and difficult to scan, and eligibility itself was the hardest part to get right: rules that are easy to misread, sitting right at the moment a student most needed a clear, direct answer. Because the tool supports real education decisions, the redesign needed to build trust and reduce that confusion, not just reorganize it.
Reduce overwhelm
Break the flow into clearer sections.
Improve readability
Support accessibility across devices.
Clarify outcomes
Make unmet requirements easier to understand.
Support review
Let users check and edit answers before submitting.
Signature moment · Guidance
From policy to plain answer
Dense policy, made plain.
Eligibility for in-state tuition depends on rules that are easy to misread and costly to get wrong. Instead of presenting that logic as one dense explanation, the redesign broke it into the tool's own step-by-step structure and paired every unmet requirement with an actual next step instead of a flat no.
Before
Eligibility rules folded into one dense explanation, with no clear next step when something didn't qualify.
After
Eligibility calculated as its own step, with plain language in place of policy phrasing and a concrete next step paired with every unmet requirement.
Signature moment · The five-step journey
The real flow
Five steps to an answer.
The tool walks every student through the same structure end to end: instructions, personal information, eligibility calculation, review, and results. Nothing arrives as a surprise partway through.
- 1 Instructions
- 2 Personal Information
- 3 Calculating Eligibility
- 4 Review
- 5 Eligibility Results
The review step, highlighted above, gets a closer look further down this page.
Eligibility experience
Review and guidance across screens.
Two views of the same redesign: the full review experience on desktop, and the eligibility flow students actually use on their phones.
Signature moment · Review
My focus · Review page
Check everything, before it counts.
Step four in the flow above is the page I designed myself: a full review of every answer a student entered, laid out for fast scanning, with a clear edit path back into any earlier step. For a tool tied to real education decisions, that page was the last chance to catch a mistake before it shaped an outcome, and in testing, every participant who saw it agreed it was essential.
- Full recap. Every entered answer, laid out for fast scanning rather than a raw data dump.
- Direct edit paths. A way back into any earlier step, no restart required.
- Tested and confirmed. The one screen every participant in testing said was essential.
Users & research
Testing showed what mattered most.
My contribution
I led user research synthesis to translate testing feedback into clearer design priorities around trust, readability, results clarity, and the need for a strong review-and-edit experience.
In usability testing with three participants:
The review page is necessary and makes it easy to go back and fix mistakes.
The form looks professional and well-structured, but the emojis made it feel less serious.
Process
Design changes rooted in comprehension.
North star
Help students move through a high-stakes eligibility process with more clarity, confidence, and support.
- Research synthesis
- Form restructuring
- Review page design
- Accessibility refinement
What I led
- Research synthesis. Helped the team prioritize where users were losing trust or feeling overwhelmed.
- Review page design. Covered in more detail in the signature moment above.
- Accessibility advocacy. Pushed for stronger readability, hierarchy, spacing, and responsive behavior.
Final solution
- Multi-section form flow. Reduced cognitive load by breaking the tool into clearer steps.
- Clearer eligibility results. Highlighted unmet requirements and paired them with actionable next steps.
- Review page with edit controls. Let users confidently verify and revise answers without losing context.
Project results
What changed after launch.
Since launch, the redesigned tool has measurably changed how students move through it. These numbers describe the tool and the project as a whole, not any one person's individual output.
These are project-level outcomes, reflecting the work of the full team. My own contribution was concentrated earlier in the process: research synthesis, the review page design, and pushing for accessibility across the flow.
Client feedback
"Develop for Good supported us in refreshing and updating our CA In-State Tuition Tool, a key resource that contributes to our mission of education access."
Madeleine Villanueva, Interim Director of Higher Education at Immigrants Rising