Self-initiated exploration. Not commissioned or deployed.
A program finder that starts with questions
The institutional question: can a prospective student find the right program without first learning the university's org chart?
Figure ratio · 3:4
The full study
Why it is difficult
Students say "community health"; catalogs say department names. Programs span schools, and the visitor's vocabulary rarely matches the institution's.
Constraints & stakeholders
Registrar data quality, admissions marketing, accessibility requirements, and most arrivals on a phone, mid-search, from an AI answer or a link.
Hypothesis
Start from the student's intention, not the institution's structure, then map their language onto programs.
Approach
A question-first entry, synonym mapping between student language and catalog terms, and results that carry degree and duration context.
Decisions & tradeoffs
One question, not a quiz. Each added step loses more students than it qualifies. The browsable catalog stays one tap away.
What it demonstrates
Search design, content mapping and mobile-first interaction for the admissions moment that matters most.
What we would measure
Proposed, not achieved: search success across audience vocabularies; time to a relevant program; rate of fallback to "all programs."
To test with a real institution
Real catalog data and a real corpus of student language: synonym maps built from guesses miss the vocabularies that matter.