Portland State University

The genesis of myNextSteps was a desire to improve the student experience by providing a mobile-first web app that makes it easy to understand and complete the important tasks associated with being a student. The first iteration, a multi-page spreadsheet, was comprehensive but couldn't be customized, sorted, or labeled, and was nearly inscrutable on small devices. We sought to change that with myNextSteps.

Not wanting to start the design process without first questioning our assumptions, I built an interactive prototype which we used to solicit feedback during a student usability testing session. Now live, myNextSteps is wonderfully capable on mobile and uses a split-pane paradigm to leverage the extra real estate of larger screens. myNextSteps, which has the features we expect of task management apps, proves that the complicated business of being a student can be made simple with clean design and thoughtful information architecture.