Design
findmyprofessor.ca
Helping students across Canada discover professors by research interest and expertise.
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- UI Designer
- Context
- Live product
- Stack
- Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop
The problem
Finding a research supervisor in Canada is surprisingly hard. University faculty directories are inconsistent — some schools list research interests, some don't. Students end up cold-emailing professors based on a Google search and hoping for the best. findmyprofessor.ca aggregates professors from 25+ Canadian universities into one searchable, filterable index.
My role
I designed the full UI — landing page, search experience, and professor profile cards — working in Figma and polishing assets in Illustrator and Photoshop. The product was built by a small team; I owned the design end-to-end, from early wireframes to final specs handed off to engineering.
Search that feels obvious
The search experience needed to handle three different user intents: finding a specific professor by name, exploring a research area, and filtering by practical criteria (department, school, whether they're accepting students). The result was a unified search bar paired with persistent filter chips — no separate pages, no mode switching.
Scale
The platform now serves 1,000+ active users and processes over 4,500 search queries a month. Designing for that density early — making sure professor cards were scannable at scale, that tag systems didn't collapse under hundreds of research areas — was the central design challenge.