TIMELINE
01.2026 - 05.2026
ROLE
UI/UX Designer
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam
Cooper
OVERVIEW
Real reviews of real co-op experiences, built by and for Northeastern students.
MY ROLE - UI/UX DESIGNER
Cooper is a co-op review platform for Northeastern students. I designed the admin dashboard that co-op coordinators use to keep those reviews trustworthy, plus the pay modal and welcome screen on the student side.
The Challenge
Co-op coordinators needed one place to review, flag and hide student reviews, without having to learn a complicated tool.
My Part
I designed:
Admin dashboard
+
Pay modal + welcome screen
Starting with structure
Before any pixels, I sketched both admin tools on a chalkboard: an Access Manager with two roles (view only and moderate), and a dashboard built around one table. Mapping the four states an entry can be in (normal, reported, flagged and hidden) shaped every version after. Then I blocked it out in lo-fi.
Whiteboarding the Access Manager and dashboard: filters, the open-entry view with history, the flag pop-up, and the four entry states.
Admins skim, then act
Co-op directors have bigger jobs than moderating reviews. Every version came back to one question: what does an admin need to see to decide, and what can wait until they click in?
Iterating on the dashboard
Four rounds, each shaped by designer crit and mentor feedback.
V1
One card per item
Every review, role and company has its own card. Easy to read one at a time, but slow to scan when there are dozens.
V2
A triage table
I moved to a table grouped into New this week, Flagged and Reported, with actions on the left so admins can clear a queue quickly. This became the version we handed to dev.
V3
How much goes on a row?
I tested how much detail each row should carry, from stacked metadata down to a single scannable line.
V4
Read first, act second
My design lead pushed me to design for real admin scenarios. Rows now lead with type and status (New, Flagged, Hidden), and clicking one opens a side drawer to read the full review and take action.
Final design
A reviews backlog that shows just enough to decide, with everything else one click away.
The side drawer
Clicking a row opens the full review with its role and company context. Flag and Hide sit at the bottom, so admins read before they act.
Access Manager: inviting admins and managing who can moderate.
Built on the Cooper brand book
Our team documented Cooper's colors, type and components in a shared brand book. I wrote the sitemap and UI component pages, and the dashboard uses the same Cooper Blue, Hanken Grotesk and card patterns.
Also on Cooper
On the student side, I designed the pay modal, which compares a role's pay to the Cooper and industry averages and lists benefits, and the welcome screen new users see after onboarding.
The final welcome screen: the Cooper dog, white on blue, chosen from five directions in crit.
Challenges & Takeaways
Successes
Cooper currently has 50+ reviews made by real Northeastern students.
Working with a design system meant staying consistent with every component/color/text style.
Worked 1:1 with software engineers to implement and QA designs for an exact match.
Constraints
Reviews, roles and companies all live in one view, so each needed to read differently at a glance.
Admins are busy co-op directors, we do not yet know how many coordinators were invited through the Access Manager before handoff.
This experience taught me just how precise and creative I need to be in order to differentiate cards from one another that have similar information. Working with an amazing team, I became passionate on this student community project.
