InFlight / 2016-2021
Student Experience
Made enrollment, tuition, and scheduling tasks easier to complete on mobile, improving student confidence while reducing avoidable support demand for universities.
Design Highlights
Overview
Student Experience modernized administrative workflows for higher education institutions running legacy systems like PeopleSoft. Using InFlight's UI platform and design system, the project transformed complex enrollment, tuition, financial aid, and scheduling workflows into modern, mobile-responsive experiences for university students.
Challenge
Student-facing administrative systems at universities were built on legacy platforms with outdated, confusing interfaces. Students struggled to navigate enrollment, tuition payments, financial aid applications, and schedule management, basic tasks that should be straightforward. The poor experiences generated high volumes of support tickets and frustrated students who expected consumer-grade digital experiences.
Approach
Applied InFlight's design system to create a modern UI layer for university administrative systems, adapting the same platform that served Fortune 500 HR teams to higher education contexts. Focused on making complex administrative workflows (enrollment, financial aid, tuition) navigable for students who had no training on the underlying systems. Mobile-first responsive design ensured students could manage their academic lives from any device.
Solution
Built a student portal covering enrollment, tuition payment, financial aid, and schedule management. The InFlight design system provided consistent components and interaction patterns across all university implementations regardless of the underlying platform. Complex multi-step processes like financial aid applications were redesigned with progressive disclosure and clear status indicators.
Impact
Students could manage enrollment, tuition, and schedules from mobile devices instead of depending on desktop-only legacy screens. Universities saw higher student satisfaction and fewer support tickets as common administrative tasks became clearer and more self-service. For InFlight, the work extended its enterprise modernization model into higher education and demonstrated that the same platform could serve distinct customer contexts.
Key Learnings
Students expect consumer-grade experiences from their university systems. The bar is set by the apps they use daily, not by other enterprise software. The InFlight platform's ability to modernize different legacy systems (PeopleSoft for HR, PeopleSoft for student admin) with consistent design patterns proved the approach was domain-agnostic.