Product/ UX Designer
U-Ariadna
A web app for California families planning a college application — from ninth grade to the offer. I designed it, built it, and run it. It’s live at uariadna.com, with real families inside.
Long story short
I built this one for myself first. My own kids are in high school in California, and the admissions system turned out to be harder than anyone had warned me — not because it is secret, but because it is scattered. A–G is fifteen specific year-long courses. The GPA the University of California reads is not the GPA on the school transcript. Every system closes on its own date, and the dates move.
Every piece is published somewhere. The picture is nowhere.
Services
Tools
The name comes from the obvious place, but the useful half is the part people forget: Ariadne gave Theseus the thread, and then he walked the labyrinth himself. That is the product. It does not apply anywhere for you and it does not replace a counsellor. It gives you one thread through four years — a month-by-month plan pinned to your child’s grade, a checklist that shows where you actually are, and deadlines that arrive before they matter instead of after.
A late start does not void it. The years you missed get sorted into what can still be caught up and what cannot, with what compensates for what cannot. That was a design decision, not a technical one: a planner that opens with everything you have already failed is a planner nobody opens twice.
The hardest part was not the interface. Admission numbers come from the Common Data Set, which is the standard source and perfectly good for percentages. Deadlines do not: I take those only from each university’s own live page, by hand. Cal Poly and Caltech settled it — their published CDS dates had already drifted from the current cycle. A wrong deadline, in a product whose whole promise is deadlines, is worse than no product at all. Fifty-one universities: admission rates and cost for all of them, their own deadlines for forty-one.
Then there is the half nobody sees. Families sign in by magic link or a family password. Reminders go out on a schedule with a watchdog that shouts if the schedule goes quiet. Backups are encrypted before they leave the server, and the key is not on it. The AI consultant runs with zero data retention demanded on every single request, and the privacy page says so in plain words — because this product knows which school a particular child attends.
Eighty-four integration tests and twelve end-to-end. An adversarial review caught an IDOR in my own code before it shipped. I am still shipping to it.
PRODUCT
