Case study
2023 - 2025
Role: initiator, UX,
frontend, deployment
Part of Marje3
PSUT Archive
A platform where students find past exams and study materials. I started it, designed the experience, built the frontend, and structured how course and exam data is organized.
01. Context
Context
A library nobody had built
Past exams, lecture notes and solved problem sets all existed already — scattered across private chat groups, personal drives and whoever still had a copy. Finding anything depended on knowing the right person.
PSUT Archive collects it in one place, organized by course and term.
02. Problem
Problem
The context of use is the design brief
Storage was never the hard part. People reach for this platform at 2am the night before a final: stressed, short on time, on a phone.
An interface that reads as perfectly reasonable when you evaluate it at a desk can fall apart completely in that state — one extra step, one ambiguous label, one slow page.
03. Process
Process
Fewest steps between arriving and downloading
So the architecture is search-first rather than browse-first, categorised by course and term because that is how students already hold the material in their heads, with as few steps as possible between opening the site and having the file.
I designed the information architecture, built the frontend and handled deployment. How the course and exam data is structured mattered more than any individual screen.
04. Outcome
Outcome
Where it stands
- Reach
- 10,000+
- Students using the platform each month.
- Scope
- Campus-wide
- Courses across the university, by term.
- Model
- Student-led
- Maintained and extended by students who use it.
The project is also where the Marje3 initiative started, and it set the pattern for everything built under it since — tools owned by the students who depend on them.
Postscript
Usability is not a property of an interface on its own. It is a property of an interface and the situation someone is in when they reach for it.
This is the project that moved me from "can I build this?" to "is there a better way to build this, so the people using it actually can?".