// Case Study: Service Design · Systems Redesign · Higher Education · 2017–2021

Redesigning the Advising Experience

Liberal Studies had a reputation as the hardest major to navigate on campus. It wasn't — it was just prescribed. Nothing about how advising worked helped students see that. I inherited a paper filing cabinet, five days of handoff, and a 600-student caseload, and rebuilt the advising experience end to end: infrastructure, access, and belonging, all at once.

Sole designer & owner 600-student caseload 5 days of handoff training

01. Project at a Glance

Building an Advising System From Scratch

Role

Lead Academic Advisor & Lecturer, San Diego State University (2017–2021)

My Role in This Project

Sole designer and owner: identified the problem, built the data process, designed the intervention, and ran it independently within a 600-student caseload

Tools / Systems

Google Workspace, Streak (Gmail mail-merge), institutional reporting via SDSU's data administrator

Starting Point

Paper filing cabinet, mostly walk-in hours, no proactive outreach, five days of handoff training

02. The Reputation That Wasn't True

Liberal Studies wasn't complicated — it was prescribed.

I was hired as an Academic Advisor for SDSU's Liberal Studies program, a degree track for future elementary school teachers, requiring a prescribed spread of coursework across nearly every subject a K-6 teacher eventually has to teach. I inherited the role from a retiring advisor with only five days of crossover training, landing directly into orientation season with a full caseload and an unfamiliar catalog.

The program had a campus-wide reputation for being hard to navigate, not because the coursework was harder, but because the requirements were so specific and prescribed.

One wrong elective could derail a semester.

Unlike other majors, Liberal Studies students had no general advising office to fall back on: I was their only point of contact for both general and major advising.

Advising was overwhelmingly walk-in, appointments were rarely offered, and records lived on paper in a physical filing cabinet.

The constraint stack

Brand-new advisor No onboarding runway Mistrustful student population Zero digital infrastructure to build on

03. What This Actually Was

I didn't carry the title UX Designer when any of this happened. But it was UX work, no matter what the org chart called it.

Redesigning how students experienced a broken system, end to end, required the same moves any service redesign does: mapping the journey, closing gaps, and building infrastructure where none existed.

What It Was Called at the Time

What I Actually Did

Advising sheet

Designed an individualized, living user record: editable, shareable, versioned by meeting

Paper filing cabinet → Google Drive folders

Migrated the records system to enable continuity and remote access

Mostly walk-in hours, appointments rare

Inherited a single-channel access model with a capacity bottleneck

Adding appointments + extended hours

Expanded access channels to match real user constraints

Orientation redesign

Re-sequenced onboarding to close the loop (inform → register → confirm) before the "product" launched

DFW report + spreadsheet tracking

Built a lightweight CRM / lifecycle-outreach system, without budget for the real tool

Open house, Lunch on the Lawn, hikes, camp

Designed community-layer programming to build trust ahead of need, not just respond to crisis

04. Research & Discovery

The students I could see, and the ones I couldn't.

Incoming freshmen and transfer students were, in a sense, the visible population: they showed up to orientation, met me, and had a natural on-ramp into the program. Freshmen often arrived unsure of who to turn to. Transfer students, mostly local and juggling work, arrived with credits that rarely mapped cleanly onto the program's prescribed sequence.

But the students I really needed to worry about were the ones who never showed up at all: missed orientation, never scheduled an appointment, went unseen for a term or longer. Not because they didn't exist, but because the model I inherited had no way of noticing their absence, exactly why I redesigned it. They were also disproportionately the ones struggling most.

The underlying problem: advising was reactive, not relational.

What the first few weeks surfaced

There was no formal research phase; the discovery happened through direct observation in my first weeks.

Access was the first bottleneck

Walk-in hours were limited, and there was one advisor covering a caseload of about 600 students. Advising overflowed into email, which brought its own frustration: long threads and high volume, with students telling me they'd rather sit down with a person than negotiate their plan over email.

Records lived on paper

No continuity when I was out, no easy handoff to another advisor, and real risk of losing information.

Orientation reinforced the wrong story

New students got a dense degree audit report, walked through once, a format that made the major feel more overwhelming, not less, entrenching the "this program is complicated" reputation rather than debunking it.

There was no proactive outreach

Students who earned a D, F, or withdrawal had no systematic flag catching them. This led me to leverage the Proactive Advising Model, an approach backed by substantial research. It resonated immediately; I'd once been a student who needed exactly this kind of support and didn't get it.

The Reframe

Liberal Studies wasn't complicated — it was prescribed. The problem was never the degree map. It was that nothing in the advising experience helped students trust it was navigable — or that someone was there to help them read it.

05. Redesign: Rebuilding Advising From the Ground Up

Three fronts at once, guided by one philosophy.

I moved on infrastructure, access, and belonging simultaneously, guided by one philosophy: be proactive rather than reactive, and listen to understand rather than just respond. Referrals became warm handoffs: I personally connected students to the right person, whether financial aid or, for serious concerns, the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. Tracking mattered, because the students who came to advising were already doing what they should; the real risk was the ones who never showed up, and tracking let me actually see them.

Infrastructure: From Paper to Living Documents

A digital advising sheet built on what was already working.

I replaced static paper advising sheets with individualized, editable four-year (or two-year, for transfers) academic plans in Google Sheets, a tool already available at no added cost. I framed these as living documents, updated at every meeting rather than fixed contracts, so students could treat advising as ongoing rather than a one-time transaction.

I paired this with digital student folders on Google Drive, replacing the physical filing cabinet and enabling remote access and easy handoff between advisors. Rollout started with incoming students in 2017 rather than retrofitting the whole caseload; student assistants digitized the paper backlog in parallel.

What I kept

— Students liked having a birds-eye view of course requirements in one place
— A document they can refer to

What wasn't working

— The paper version was generic, not built around the individual student
— Didn't reflect their specific progress, credits, or plan
— Copies lived in a physical filing cabinet; students misplaced theirs and had to wait in line for another

I added the following elements to customize the advising sheet based on each student's information:

Sample individualized Liberal Studies education plan for a fictional student, showing expected graduation and catalog year, a course-by-course checklist with term completed, units, grade, and notes, and a two-year education plan broken out by fall and spring semester with primary and backup courses.

The digital advising sheet I designed, replacing the generic paper version.

1 Expected graduation and catalog year

"When will I graduate?" was one of the most frequent questions I got, and I could never just guess at it. Catalog year determines the actual requirements a student is on the hook for, so both needed to live on the page itself, not in my head or buried in a transcript. Seeing an actual date also turned graduation from something abstract into a real, visible goal.

2 Additional course information and notes

I filled this in ahead of the meeting, not during it, so a student's transcript history was already on the page when they sat down. That freed up the actual meeting time for their plan and their questions, instead of me pulling up records while they waited.

3 A checklist and reminders section

Some course-related requirements were the kind that could quietly delay a graduation if missed entirely, prerequisite sequencing especially. This section caught those, alongside the same course questions I answered over and over, so a student could self-check instead of finding out too late.

4 A customizable education plan

Student and I mapped their courses out together and could move them around easily as plans changed, which made it a real registration tool, not just a record. This included backup courses for classes that were waitlisted or at risk of a schedule conflict, so a student always had a plan B already mapped out. They left knowing exactly what to register for, primary and backup alike.

5 A year-by-year checklist

Beyond courses, there was a whole second list of things a student needed to graduate, or to be ready for grad school if they were headed that way. Having it broken out by year meant nothing quietly became "someone else's problem" or slipped until it was too late to fix.

Access & Onboarding

Appointments, not just walk-ins. Closing the loop before day one.

Access: expanding the channels

I made scheduled appointments a real, consistent option alongside walk-in and email advising, rather than the rare exception they'd been. I paired this with extended hours to accommodate transfer and non-traditional students juggling jobs.

Onboarding: closing the loop before day one

Every student left orientation confident they were registered for the correct courses, not just informed about them, followed by a mandatory one-on-one before the semester started and, for freshmen, a follow-up Zoom workshop to confirm their schedule. This also gave students a second chance to get questions answered beyond what orientation had time for.

Transfer credit mapping

For transfer students, this is where I caught and resolved credit-mapping mismatches, a frequent issue given how prescribed the program was. This required evaluating the syllabus from the community college course and comparing it to the SDSU course, submitting a petition to match the course, and notifying students of their options.

Service blueprint: how advising ran across a term, from a new student's view

Liberal Studies new student advising appointment service blueprint, mapping student phase, time, physical evidence, student journey and pain points, student actions, frontstage advisor actions and technology, backstage advisor actions and technology, and support process across orientation, before start of term, weeks 1-10, weeks 11-15, and term break.

Belonging: Building a Community, Not Just a Caseload

Trust wasn't going to come from paperwork alone, so I added a layer of co-curricular programming.

Open house, each fall

A low-stakes, snacks-and-games setting where students met me and each other before they ever needed advising, so trust started before the first problem did.

Lunch on the Lawn

A weekly, advising-optional gathering that stayed popular enough for students to run it themselves when I couldn't be there, a sign the community had become theirs, not just mine.

Outdoor programming

A hike at Cowles Mountain and a weekend trip to outdoor education camp gave students a shared experience outside the classroom, the kind that bonds a cohort rather than a caseload.

Registration workshops

Timed around students' free periods and run as a group, so freshmen figured out registration alongside peers instead of alone in an office.

Plus an active social media presence, including a Facebook group new students were invited to join, used to share major information, events, scholarship and employment opportunities, and as a space for students to post and connect with each other, along with a growing Instagram presence highlighting events and student stories.

Fall 2019 SDSU Liberal Studies registration workshop flyer, printed on a woodland leaf background.

Mock Instagram posts from the department's account — scroll within the frame to see more. One channel of the belonging layer built alongside the advising redesign.

Rebuilding the Tool I Didn't Have

A lightweight CRM, without a budget for the real one.

SDSU hadn't yet adopted EAB Navigate, a student success management and advising software I'd used at a prior institution to track and message at-risk students. Without it, I requested a manual report from the data office, full caseload plus a separate list of students earning a D, F, or W once grades posted, and rebuilt a lightweight version of that tracking system myself using a spreadsheet and a Gmail mail-merge add-on (Streak).

That D/F/W list fed directly into a separate, more structured intervention I built for students who landed on academic probation — read that process in the Academic Probation case study →

Ensuring full coverage, not just outreach to strugglers

Beyond flagging at-risk students, I built a system to guarantee every new student had two advising touch-points within their first semester: orientation plus the pre-semester one-on-one counted as the first, and a required check-in later in the term as the second. I cross-referenced the caseload report against my appointment records to track who hadn't come in, and for students who missed orientation, I pulled attendance data from the orientation team and assistant dean and followed up by email until they came in.

Sample advising tracker Google Sheet, a lightweight CRM tracking admit year, student ID, name, email, advising dates, and notes, color-coded green for seen twice, yellow for seen once, and white for no advising yet.

The advising tracker I built to catch students who hadn't been seen.

06. Outcomes

What changed, and what I can honestly claim.

Organic space adoption

The office's lounge area became a space students chose to hang out in outside scheduled meetings, a sign the office had shifted from "place you go when something's wrong" to a resource students felt comfortable returning to.

Community-driven continuity

Lunch on the Lawn became popular enough to run without me present, hosted by students themselves.

Complementary online engagement

An active departmental Facebook group reinforced the same community-building goal online.

Sustained rollout

The digital plan and folder system became the standard for every incoming student from 2017 onward, with the paper backlog fully migrated.

Lasting shift toward appointments

Five years later, advising is now primarily appointment-based, with drop-in advertised as a secondary option, a real reversal from the walk-in-first model I inherited.

Note: I'm not claiming the community-building programs continued as-is, since COVID changed how these programs operated afterward and I don't have reliable visibility into what carried forward.

07. What I'd Carry Forward

Looking back, I could have leaned more on software to close the remaining gaps.

Self-serve resources

Advising modules on Canvas, or recorded workshops for students who couldn't attend live.

An FAQ

For common advising questions, so students could self-serve routine answers instead of booking a full appointment.

Restructured transfer timing

I waited until after orientation, which meant seeing 70–80 new transfer students in about four weeks, a real bottleneck. Meeting them as soon as they were admitted would have spread that load out and made the pacing far more sustainable.

Keep exploring

Michelle Xiong celebrating with graduating Liberal Studies students at commencement