UCAS – REDESIGNING A DIGITAL SERVICE FOR MILLIONS OF STUDENTS

Creating a responsive experience for one of the UK's most recognised education platforms

Role

Lead UI designer

Duration

6 months

Team

UI/UX team

Requirements

Mobile first
Responsive
Modular

As Creative Lead for the UI phase of the UCAS website redesign, I transformed UX wireframes into a responsive interface that balanced a bold new visual identity with the needs of students navigating one of the most important decisions of their education.

Working alongside UX designers, I developed the interface across a wide range of page templates using a mobile-first approach, ensuring the experience remained intuitive and consistent across phones, tablets and desktop devices.

My role

Led the visual and interaction design from wireframes through to final UI.
Worked closely with UX designers to refine user journeys and interface behaviour.
Created responsive page templates within a Drupal-based design framework.
Established a consistent visual language across a flexible component hierarchy.
Collaborated with stakeholders to align branding, usability and technical requirements.

Design challenge

The project sat at the intersection of several competing demands. UCAS's branding agency was simultaneously evolving the organisation's offline identity, while the website needed to support complex information architecture, diverse content types and a predominantly student audience with very different devices and browsing habits.

The challenge was to create an interface that felt modern and engaging without sacrificing clarity or usability. Every design decision needed to reinforce consistency across hundreds of pages while giving content editors the flexibility to build a wide variety of layouts within Drupal.

Outcome

The result was a responsive design framework that successfully combined a new visual identity with clear, user-focused interaction design. By creating reusable templates and a consistent visual language, the project delivered a cohesive experience that supported complex content while remaining approachable for students across multiple devices.

The project strengthened my experience designing large-scale public-facing digital services, translating UX into polished interfaces and creating scalable design foundations that balanced user needs, business objectives and technical constraints.