UOC · From a complex catalog to a decision experience

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) is an online university with a large and varied range of programs. During my time at Fail Fast, I worked as a UX Designer on the redesign of its study offering, rethinking how programs were organized, explored, and evaluated on the website: from the first contact with the catalog to requesting information or enrolling.

Redesigning the study offering meant bringing coherence to a large ecosystem of degrees, content, and entry points. The challenge was to serve both people who wanted to explore options and people who arrived with a specific goal, without losing clarity anywhere along the way.

• The menu showed many options at once and was hard to scan.
• Some category names didn’t always match users’ mental models.
• During the navigation audit, I found that the same goal (finding a program) could follow up to five different logics depending on the type of program.
• Listing pages, search, and program pages needed to make the deciding information visible. Program pages in particular held a lot of content and needed a more navigable structure.
• People comparing options had no dedicated tool to do it.

The goal was to build a coherent experience from the first contact with the catalog to requesting information or enrolling.

The research team had already worked with current students, prospective students, and stakeholders. I received the findings through presentations, documents, Miro boards, and spreadsheets, and turned them into product decisions.

The results showed two complementary needs:

• Clarity to find your way: the difference between browsing by degree and by area wasn’t always obvious, and some labels and groupings caused confusion.
• Information to decide: price, curriculum, calendar, admission requirements, credits, and workload had to appear with a clear hierarchy. Student testimonials mattered more close to the moment of decision.

I turned these findings into content priorities and experience principles.

The menu audit revealed two connected problems: many options visible at the same time, and up to five different logics for reaching a program depending on its type.

Based on the audit and the insights, I proposed a mega menu with up to three levels to organize exploration without hiding the variety of the offering. The structure had to work both for people who wanted to discover options by type of program or area of study and for people looking for a specific degree.

Instead of forcing the same depth on every path, I defined a common rule with explicit variations: a first level for program types, a second level for areas when they added context, and a third level to reach programs or relevant listings. Direct paths stayed in place when an extra layer added no value.

The two- and three-level menu cases let us check that the system handled the catalog’s real variations while staying predictable.

Coherent navigation was only the first step. The experience also had to help people narrow a large catalog down to manageable options, without making them filter before they understood what they were exploring.

User insights showed that it was easy to lose focus on very long listing pages. To address this, exploration combined two layers:

• The mega menu led to listings already filtered by program type or area of study, giving people a smaller starting point.
  
• When a listing had to keep a broad set of programs, it included search and filters to organize and narrow it without losing context.
  

The landing page for each area also answered a priority question: giving relevant information about the UOC’s study model from the first read. Requesting information was built in as support during exploration.

With this structure, people could explore by program type or area of study, start from a relevant set of results, search by course, area, or degree while combining filters, and move from a listing to a program page along a clear path.

When several options could fit, the comparison tool let people gather relevant programs and compare them before requesting information or enrolling. It was built into the listing experience, at the moment when people were still exploring and needed to decide between programs, so they didn’t have to open several program pages and remember the differences.

The goal was to make exploring programs easier with a faster overview and simpler search, both for people who wanted to discover options and for those who arrived with a specific need.

The program page held a large amount of academic information and was one of the key moments in the journey. The challenge was to make it clearer, easier to scan, and easier to navigate. It also had to reflect the content priorities identified for students and stakeholders.

Main problems found:

• The online, asynchronous study model wasn’t clear enough. It was a recurring question in the interviews and had to be explained from each degree’s introduction.
• Relevant information was scattered across a very long page. Details like price, requirements, curriculum, or format could take too much effort to find.
• The existing menu reloaded the page every time the section changed. This interrupted reading, added waiting time, and made specific content harder to find.
• Content prioritization had to reconcile two perspectives. Student and stakeholder needs came from different rankings that didn’t always match.
  

Design decisions:

1. Build a hierarchy from a prioritization matrix. I crossed the student and stakeholder rankings with the research findings and the patterns reviewed in the benchmark to order the content.

   

2. Make the study model explicit from the introduction. The degree introduction had to establish the online, asynchronous nature of the experience from the start.

3. Group the information into three layers: a summary for deciding (title, description, price, credits, dates, format, available places, and information or enrollment actions), local navigation by topic (introduction, curriculum, enrollment, career opportunities, quality, and experiences), and progressive content (academic, financial, and experience details, following the questions that come up during evaluation).

4. Replace page changes with anchor navigation. The top menu stayed with the page and let people jump between sections without reloading it, keeping context and cutting waiting time.

   

The architecture grouped academic, financial, admission, and experience information into progressive blocks, so each person could go deeper based on their own questions.

Once the architecture, navigation patterns, listing pages, search, program page, and comparison tool were validated, the UI team applied the visual language. My work continued with UX reviews to make sure the decisions on hierarchy, content, and navigation held up in the final interface.

Attribution note: The initial research was done by the research team, and the visual design by the UI team. My work focused on applied synthesis, information architecture, navigation, prioritization, listing pages, search, wireframes, and UX review.

As of this review, the redesigned study offering is still live, and the patterns we defined are still present on the UOC’s public website.

• The catalog is structured by program type and area of study.
• Listing pages offer search and filtering.
• Program pages organize extensive academic information into navigable sections.
• Requesting information keeps a clear presence.
• The program comparison tool became part of the experience.

The result was a structural transformation taken to production, built together by research, UX, UI, the client, and development.

See the current study offering (opens in a new tab) · See programs by area (opens in a new tab)